I work in a staffing department and help manage the staffing of several call centers. Periodically, they take a pool of bankers and realign the schedules to gain efficiencies. All the agents are assigned a rank, and we produce a pool of schedules for how many agents there are. The agents then choose enough schedules to match their rank (I.E. someone ranked 3 would have to choose 3 different schedules). In theory, this works, because they know that they will at least get one schedule that they have chosen.
The perplexing issue that I have been wrestling with is this. I would like to automate the selection process. I am including a small example so I can illustrate my issue:
What we are doing right now is sorting based on rank and marking off schedules as they are used. For example, Agent2 will get Schedule 3 because he is ranked the highest. However, when I move to Agent3, Schedule 3 has already been taken. There is a master list of schedules, and we are meticulously crossing them off and checking each Agent. This wouldn't be bad if there were only 5 agents like in the example, but there are over 2000, and you can imagine how tedious that can become. Not to mention the human error that is introduced.
What I am looking for is a solution, or some kind soul to point me in the right direction as to how I can automate this process. I know Excel pretty well and Access fairly well, and I am not sure how I should tackle this.
Thank you,
~bothell
The perplexing issue that I have been wrestling with is this. I would like to automate the selection process. I am including a small example so I can illustrate my issue:
| Book1 | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C | D | E | F | G | H | I | |||
| 2 | Choices | ||||||||
| 3 | Name | Rank | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 4 | Agent1 | 4 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 2 | |||
| 5 | Agent2 | 1 | 3 | ||||||
| 6 | Agent3 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 1 | ||
| 7 | Agent4 | 3 | 5 | 2 | 4 | ||||
| 8 | Agent5 | 2 | 4 | 3 | |||||
Sheet1 | |||||||||
What we are doing right now is sorting based on rank and marking off schedules as they are used. For example, Agent2 will get Schedule 3 because he is ranked the highest. However, when I move to Agent3, Schedule 3 has already been taken. There is a master list of schedules, and we are meticulously crossing them off and checking each Agent. This wouldn't be bad if there were only 5 agents like in the example, but there are over 2000, and you can imagine how tedious that can become. Not to mention the human error that is introduced.
What I am looking for is a solution, or some kind soul to point me in the right direction as to how I can automate this process. I know Excel pretty well and Access fairly well, and I am not sure how I should tackle this.
Thank you,
~bothell
