I am looking for a solution, or a base for a solution I can customize, that would help me schedule a project based on available employee hours. I have looked for a while and haven't found anything that would completely suit my needs, and I am hoping to gather as much resources as possible.

The main thing I am looking for is being able to know when employees/departments are overbooked on certian days, and also if the project will even fit on the current schedule. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Jess

Jess:

Have you looked at Schedula Pro? It's a FileMaker solution that (if I recall correctly) does this kind of thing. It should be available on Version Tracker. I've seen a couple of other solutions like this as well, and you're best off starting with one of them, as this can be quite a task to design from scratch.

-Stanley

Hi,

I am a filemaker developer. I made many soutions and they are running in organizations in Pakistan. I am interested in your software. Please send me mail on [email protected] and let me know the details and I will start working on the project.

Regards,

Tusif Ahmad

Hi Jess,

Stanley has suggested one solution, and I can think of a couple of others that are similar to Schedula, but I'm currious how you will measure this?

The main thing I am looking for is [color:blue]being able to know when employees/departments are overbooked on certian days, and also if the project will even fit on the current schedule.

Lee

The main thing I am looking for is being able to know when employees/departments are overbooked on certian days, and also if the project will even fit on the current schedule. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

It sounds like you are looking for work group scheduling with conflict detection at both the employee level and the department level plus project management. I have done this kind of thing before and I think you will find that it gets fairly sophisticated fairly fast. More so if you are going to display the results in either graph or calendar format.

One thing that will help you out is if you spell out the business rules really clearly to yourself prior to starting.

1. What are the steps to a project and how is time allotted. Key here is that you make it generic to handle all of your company's projects. You do not want to be making custom alterations for every project.

2. What constitutes an overbooked employee. Are you also going to check for holidays, both statutory and booked vacation? Do you have to account for labor laws in various locations? An example of this I believe is some states have overtime after say 44 hours per week but I think California has overtime after 8 hours in a day. Is the project being completed in more than one location?

3. When is a department booked? How do you know?

These are a few of the things that should be answered that might affect any company.

There may be particular business rules to apply in this particular business. An example of that is group homes where there must be not only a certain number of staff on duty at all times 24/7, but there must be minimum numbers of particular kinds of staff on duty 24/7. A general pool of bodies does not good. Scheduling must be position by position.

HTH

Dave McQueen