tackling trouble areas Recurring Appointments — When Your Whiteboard Isn’t Enough Online scheduling can be the pacifier to your organizational nightmares. By: Stewart Hill Image courtesy of ClickSoftware O Owning and/or operating a cleaning serv-ice business is challenging in and of itself, but scheduling jobs and employees’ shifts to meet the demands of your customers is a huge struggle for many. Most cleaning companies create their shift schedules manually in spreadsheets such as Excel or on whiteboards. Not only is this stressful and time-con-suming, it also leaves room for human error. This is where online scheduling comes flying in with a red cape. There are numerous challenges associ-ated with manual scheduling; online scheduling can be the cure. Time Do you have to pencil in time in your week to make an employee schedule? The fact of the matter is, if you schedule your employees manually, this is probably the case. Why? Because scheduling your employ-ees manually takes a lot of thought and analysis. You have to make sure you consider the demand, employee preference, time con-straints and many other factors; the human mind can only do so much at once. Therefore, manual scheduling ends up consuming a lot of your time and takes you away from what matters most: Finding cus-tomers and generating revenue. Online scheduling takes all the con-siderations into account for you and automatically creates a schedule fol-lowing the constraints that you have By compiling employee schedules and workloads by hand, you are inviting inaccuracies that can easily be avoided. specified. It takes the guesswork out of it and, therefore, the time. Essentially, having an online service-based scheduling system gives you back that chunk of time you have been spending doing the scheduling yourself. And, as everyone knows, time is money. Optimization To reiterate, manual scheduling leaves room for human error. Humans are amazing, but we can’t do everything. A manual schedule can have accidental overlaps, employees traveling all the way across town to get from one appointment to another and then going all the way back again, as well as other mistakes. One of the most difficult scheduling tasks for cleaning companies comes when recur-ring appointments reschedule one appoint-ment, which shifts their normal cleaning schedule by a week or two. 36 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • February 2011
CMM – Archives Feb 2011: 36
