Shift Scheduling Software for for Dispatch Centers & 911/EMS Services

Employee shift scheduling and rostering for dispatchers, communications officers, and 911 operators presents many challenges. Making sure that each shift is properly staffed with the right number of dispatchers is one of the hardest tasks that dispatch schedulers and operations managers face.  Dispatchers and 911 public safety telecommunicators typically work 24/7 using a wide range of shift configurations, from 8-hour, 10-hour, 12-hour, fixed and rotating days and night shift, to 24-hour shift. 

Union and FLSA rules place restrictions on work hours, consecutive work days, overtime compensation, as well as the types of work schedules that can be implemented. Schedulers must keep track of training assignments, compensatory time, off time and know when part-time or floaters will be available for work. Complex schedules and last minute changes can make dispatcher and public safety officer scheduling difficult and when necessary, schedulers must find qualified backup and on-call personnel to fill a shift as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Varying staffing levels, skill sets, collective bargaining agreements, and compliance regulations all play a vital role to ensure the right dispatchers are scheduled at the right time. Managing an ever-growing list of required certifications for 911 operators and emergency dispatchers and ensuring dispatchers with expired certifications are not scheduled can be very challenging if done with pencil and paper or Excel spreadsheet templates.

Snap Schedule Shift Scheduling Capabilities

Our Snap Schedule employee shift scheduling software helps 911 EMS, public safety agencies, and dispatch service organizations save significant time, resources, and costs. It offers several different shift schedule views designed to accommodate a variety of scheduling styles and shift patterns. With point-and-click scheduling ease, it warns you of scheduling conflicts, ensures policy enforcement and union compliance, calculates overtime, extra duty pay, and shift premium costs of each shift, finalizes pay sheets for payroll, and allows you to easily publish and distribute shift schedules electronically to dispatchers and managers.

Easily schedule unlimited employees and shifts

• Apply fair and equitable rotation rules and work schedules among dispatch centers, service points, workstations and more.
• View visual, color coded alerts based on continuous-conflict checking and dynamic staffing hours and costs totals.
• Drag & drop to easily assign shifts, mark time off, move or copy assignments.
• View assignments and schedule your staff from three different views. Use whichever view is easiest and most effective for your scheduling tasks.
• Create rolling work schedules – from days to years.
• Software automatically generates work schedules using industry standard shift patterns or user-definable schedule plans.

Improve communications by empowering employees with online scheduling self-service access

Available online, 24 hours a day/7 days a week and accessible to employees whether at work or at home, Snap Schedule 365 self-service features cut scheduling and administrative time by making employees more pro-active in the process.

• View Work Schedules: View employee's shift assignments, time-off, shift trades as well as co-workers’ work schedules. From this planner, employees can filter what they want to see, request time off, bid on open shifts, and trade or pick up shifts from co-workers.
• Request Time Off: Employees can make time off/vacation requests, and schedulers can track, manage, approve, or deny those requests. Employees can see the approval status and are automatically alerted when their request is approved or rejected via an in-app notification.
• Trade/Pick Up Shifts: Allow shift trading between employees with or without a scheduler’s approval. Employees can post their assigned shifts to trade with coworkers who are eligible to work the shifts.
• Punch In/Out: Employees can punch in and out of their assigned shifts, and schedulers can see the punch data in real-time in the Punch view or run reports to see the variances between planned vs. actual work hours and costs for any date range.
• Self-scheduling with Open Shifts: Empower employees by letting them self-schedule with open shifts. Schedulers can simply create an open shift for a position and specify the number of employees needed and the required skills.
• View Time Card Information: Employees can view their planned and actual work hours for the current, previous, or next payroll cycle. On-call, overtime, paid and unpaid time-off hours are also presented.
• Look Up Coworkers: Employees can look up coworker’s contact information to call, text, or email. Schedulers decide whom to include or exclude from the directory.
• Update Availability: Save time and stay up-to-date by allowing employees to update their own contact information and availability. Employees can enter their availability information for each day of the week, and in multiple time segments as needed.

Track all vacation, sick leave, and other off-work requests

• Define as many paid and unpaid time-off reasons as you like.
• Simply drag & drop a reason onto the Schedule Planner to mark when a worker is off-work.
• The Schedule Outlook shows who are off-work and why.
• Available reports provide details on planned vacation, training, time off hours for any time period you select.

Save time in managing and reporting on staff qualifications and proficiencies

• Keep complete records of permanent, full-time or part-time staff.
• Systematically track skills, certifications, training classes, and gaming licenses.
• Monitor expiration or renewal dates for certification and notify employees and management of pending expirations.
• Use Snap Schedule’s 25 customizable fields in each employee record to track information that is unique to your operation.

Adjust individual shift assignment start and end times

• When a late start is needed or an early departure is necessary, you can adjust individual workers’ shift assignment start and end times to reflect the actual hours worked. You can also adjust the hours that the workers will be paid for working a shift.
• Labor cost reports reflect any adjustments made to the individual shift start and end times.

Assign breaks and tasks within each shift

• The Task Schedule Planner provides a more granular level of control for assigning worker activities within a shift.
• Visually assign tasks of any length from 1 minute to several hours with a simple drag and drop. You may use a task to identify a scheduled break, a work station, or a specific duty.
• Standard reports provide detailed and summary information on assigned breaks and tasks for cost control, payroll, and accounting purposes.

Quickly and efficiently fill a shift or find a substitute

• Quickly find and contact a substitute worker to fill a cancellation.
• Set priorities for the order in which staff should be called in to fill a shift. Tell Snap Schedule your criteria and it will show you a ranked list of available candidates to fill a shift. Ranking can be based on many criteria including job position, skills, availability, labor cost, work hour limits, seniority, and more.

Work around your schedule constraints with ease

• Define your dispatcher operational constraints such as non-working days, shift start times, end times and applicable days of the week for each shift.
• Define each worker’s availability, desired work hours, daily work hour constraints, and weekly work hour constraints.
• The Schedule Planner alerts you to availability conflicts, duplicate shift assignments, overlapped shift assignments, and conflicts with scheduled time off.
• The Daily Assignment Validation report identifies all discrepancies and constraint violations.

Manage labor costs and avoid over/under staffing

• Set overtime policies for your dispatch operations.
• Define hourly cost, overtime exempt status and work hour constraints for each worker.
• Use the Shift Coverage planner to monitor under/over staffing conditions based on position, skill, and assignment reason.
• Adjust workers' shift assignment start time, end time, and payable hours as necessary to reflect actual work hours.
• Standard reports provide labor cost details and summary data associated with the schedules you created over any specified period.
• Use the software to export labor cost data for payroll and accounting purposes.

Easily publish schedules to dispatchers, staff members and management

• Print schedule views, lists, assignment calendars, and reports to communicate schedule information to management and your staff.
• Easily publish work schedules, calendars, and reports in PDF and a variety of other formats.
• Automatically email work schedules (in text or iCalendar file format) to workers and/or their supervisors.