Tips and Tricks for Administer Schedules and Rules

Below is a list of tips and tricks for the Administer Schedules and Rules course. Click on the links below to see information that may be helpful to you as you teach the course.

• Users
• Creating a new Wage Class
• Creating a new Wage Code
• Connecting Absence Parameters
• Creating Compensatory Parameters
• Creating a Flex Day Rule
• Creating an Overtime Rule
• Creating a Parameter List
• Creating Working Hours Schedules
• Assigning a Schedule to an Employee
• Modify Employee Schedule Connection
• Periodic Overtime Calculation

Users

Basic Data and Requirement

Creating a New Wage Class.

Explain that the ID of the wage class has to be unique and that every student has to have his/her own wage class in which he/she will be working during the rest of the course.

Creating a New Wage Code.

• Some students have a hard time understanding why they need two overtime wage codes. It is important that they create one wage code for cash and one for comp, but both has the wage type time Overtime. It is just the ID and Description that differs.

Connecting Absence Parameters.

This is a difficult exercise since this is the student’s first encounter with the complexity of parameter settings in IFS/Time & Attendance. As a teacher, it is recommended that you go through the parameters and apply them to the wage codes that are created. Recommended parameter settings are:

This is a simple example of parameter settings for absence wage codes, not suitable for all customers, but sufficient for the purpose of training.

Creating Compensatory Parameters

In this exercise, students learn how to apply the double set of overtime wage codes which could cause some problems in the beginning of this lesson. The students add both wage codes in the respective column named Cash/Comp wage code, and learn to understand the interaction with a compensatory time balance.

• The cash wage code for 50% overtime compensation translates into the matching comp wage code (with the compensation factor of 1,5).
• The cash wage code for 100% overtime compensation translates into the matching comp wage code (with the compensation factor of 2.0).

Administering Schedules and rules

Creating a Flex Day Rule

Creating a Flex day rule is generally difficult for students. Common mistakes are: 

• No minus sign before the values in the left column
• Students often forget to connect the flex day rule to the day type
• When testing, it is common that students clock in and out outside the set limits or exceed the daily balances, giving results that seem incorrect. However, what you see are the results of a correct calculation according to the set up of the rules.

The absence parameter causes the system to use the flex limits from the day type before generating absence when the employee clocks in as absent. 

• This can be difficult to understand but can be helped by the teacher demonstrating the effects using the same clocking, changing the flex handling on for instance the wage code for Sickness and recalculating the day.

You should also demonstrate the interaction with the flextime balance.

Creating an Overtime Rule

The effects of the different calculation parameters are sometimes hard to understand for the students. There might be a need for the teacher to demonstrate and explain the effects of the different settings and their effects on the overtime/flex results that are calculated. 

Use a clocking that starts one hour before normal time and ends one hour later than normal time. Clock in with overtime in the morning and clock out with flex (normal) in the afternoon. The options in the Calculation Parameter field are:

Creating a Parameter List

Keep in mind when to use negative values for the parameters.

Creating Working Hours Schedules

There are some common problem areas in this part of the course. The first is the design of day types, the second is creating the schedule cycle, and the last is the link between substitute schedules and working hours schedules. 

Day Type:

One major problem students seem to have when creating day types is that they don’t understand how the day type defines the workday based on wage codes. 

To make this more understandable, the teacher should define a work day by drawing a timeline. On this timeline,  break down the workday in intervals of overtime, normal time and Lunch or breaks. 

See the following example:

It is important that the students understand that all days in a week have to have a day type. It is not uncommon that students forget to create day types for weekends, which would create an error message if the employee clock in for an overtime work.

For public holidays, encourage the students to analyze how they themselves work on public holidays or days before public holidays. This usually clarifies the need for additional day types other than the ones already created.

The overtime priority flag has to be set on rows with overtime wage codes. If this isn't done, it can cause some problems when the students try to save. 

Explain when it is required to use day types and when it is sufficient to enter "work hours sum" directly in the schedule details.

Cycle Schedules: 

As with the day type, it may be a good idea to define a normal working week on a timeline, showing that the same day type is applicable to all days Monday through Friday, and a separate day type is used during the weekend, resulting in a one week cycle.

It’s quite common that students forget to connect the day types to the schedule.

Point out the importance of the "cycle start date" when extracting the cycle information for, e.g., a full year. Show an example using a calendar. Start with the simple one-week (one-shift) schedule and continue with a multi-week (multi-shift) schedule. Clarify that the shift, entered in the employee schedule assignment, together with the cycle start date entered in the cycle schedule definition, is the information needed to derive the correct schedule information for the employee.

Also show that the cycle can be extracted both for future dates and past dates. Use for instance the Employee Schedule Information window.

Day-by-Day Schedules:

Normally a cycle schedule will do. In extreme cases of scheduling where no cycle pattern can be found, a day-by-day schedule is the alternative. Note that the schedule start date and end date defines the validity of the day-by-day schedule.

Substitute Schedules:

A common mistake is that students forget to connect the substitute schedules to the working hours schedule.

Assigning a Schedule to an Employee

This is a relatively easy exercise where students may experience minor problems such as:

• Unable to find the new schedule in the list of values. This usually occurs when the student has chosen an incorrect wage class.  
• A message stating ‘The employee is not employed during this period’ comes up when trying to save. This occurs when the employee doesn't have an employment period at all, or the employment period is shorter than the date interval used when saving.

Modify Employee Schedule Connection

There are two parts of this exercise that might cause some problems:

• The Change Employee Schedules and Rules dialog cannot be used if the chosen employees are connected to different wage classes 
• If the chosen From date is today or in the future, the Next button will not be enabled. The date have to be later than today. This is why clockings have to cover days that are previous to today, in order for the student to be able to see the effect of the recalculated clockings. 

Periodic Overtime Calculation

The periodic calculation normally won’t have any effect on the daily results in the Time Registration window, and the results of this calculation will only be visible in the Periodic Result form. 

Point out how the periodic overtime rules actually can affect the daily calculation.