Avoid conflicts
Beneath, I have started staffing a rota and at the moment, I am giving shifts to my employee Susan. I have chosen Susan in the list to the right:
As you can see I have already given Susan a shift on Friday, October 8th:
When I try to give Susan the available shift on Friday from 8 am - 15 pm, this message will appear:
If I give Susan the shift anyway Smartplan will tell me that there is a conflict:
As soon as there is a conflict it is not possible to publish the rota:
Smartplan will notify you if your employee already has a shift within the chosen period of time. However, it is not only in the rota you are currently planning. Smartplan will also notify you if the employee already has a shift in another rota.
When I give Susan an available shift on Friday I am told that this conflicts with another shift:
As you can see, Susan has no other shifts on Friday, and therefore, this shift conflicts with a shift, that Susan has in another rota.
This means that you can always be sure that none of your employees will have two shifts within the same period of time when you are planning your rota.
Special dilemma arising from two published rotas
In this section, we will go through a specific dilemma, that arises due to the fact that your new changes conflict with an already published rota. This may sound confusing, but there is a solution to this which we will present here.
Imagine you have planned and published a rota A in location A. You have also planned and published a rota B in location B. There was no conflict whatsoever. Now you put both rotas back into editing mode because you want to make some changes to the staffing.
You assign the employee Alex to a Monday shift in rota A. When you try to publish rota A, it tells you that it can not be published due to a conflict with a shift in the same timeframe, that Alex is assigned to in rota B. So you go to rota B and delete him from the respective shift. However, the conflict for rota A still persists. Why? The problem arises because the employee in question continues to have his old shifts until a new version of the rota is released. Only then the hours and shifts are being overwritten. You can look up the currently registered staffing under "Hours & Salary".
So you would have to publish rota B first in order for Alex to be free on Monday so that he can be assigned to the Monday shift in rota A instead.
But now imagine, that at the same time, you have the exact same issue the other way around: You tried to assign the employee Boris to a Friday shift in rota B, but now you can not publish rota B, because it conflicts with the data of the latest published version of rota A. This means, you are now stuck with two rotas, that you are not able to publish, but they need to be published in order to solve your problem.
What to do?
To resolve this issue, do the following:
- In order to be able to publish rota A, remove Alex from his assigned shift in rota A.
- Now release this rota A, as there will no longer be conflicts in it. According to the registered data, Alex now only has his Monday shift in rota B.
Go to rota B and publish it. Boris will no longer have a conflict in this rota B, because he now has no conflicting shifts in rota A anymore, as it has been overwritten due to release.
- Now that Boris has been assigned to his Friday shift in rota B, you can go ahead and add Alex to his Monday shift in rota A. There are now no conflicts because you deleted him from rota B and published this change.
This should solve your problem. If not, please contact the Support Team for further assistance.