Week 6

After the second round of client interviews, the roster process has become more and more clear, I summarize the process as follow.

1.  Disability & accommodation services department has the information of all nurses, for rostering, mainly the name, type and the working hours.

2.  Every month, coordinator in every ward distributes the “Roster Request Form” to every nurse, and asks them to fill their intended working time foe next 4 weeks.

3.  According to the staffing configuration from every unit and the collected roster request forms from nurses, coordinators schedule the roster in Excel. Then they can get vacancy information.

4.  Wards except for Highgate send the excel-based schedule to BCU to input it in KRONOS system. The Highgate input their schedule by themselves. The KRONOS is responsible for recording the starting time and leaving time of each nurse.

5.  To fill the vacancy, the coordinators send their unsatisfied need to BCU staffs, BCU has a system(SharePoint, and will be salesforce) which stored the information of clients and information of nurses in back pool. They will match nurses with clients to fill the vacancy, and input the schedule into KRONOS at the same time. If nurses in the backup pool still cannot fill the vacancy, BCU staff will contact external agents for more nurses.

6.  All nurses will attend the clients as the monthly schedule and be recorded working period by KRONOS system.

7.  For managers of nurses, they will calculate the working time and salary every fortnight, and upload the generated payroll into a system named Chris. Chris has stored detailed personal and payment information of government staff. The nurses get paid according to their attendance from Chris. 

To make it more visually, here is a ER diagram:

Actually, I am thinking other than simply giving suggestions on whether the department should buy another schedule module of KRONOS or customize the current Salesforce system, or even try other new systems, maybe we should also help improve the rostering process itself. Now the rostering work is done by different wards, however the filling vacancy things are done by the Central Business Unit. Even when the KRONOS or Salesforce system has gained scheduling function, the two tasks are handled separately. So maybe we can suggest a way to integrate these two process and save the manual process between the two systems.