Show HN: Staffjoy – Automated Workforce Scheduling
staffjoy.com
staffjoy.com
We saw a lot of tools on the market that helped managers to schedule their hourly workers, but we wanted to build a tool that used technology to do more than just digitize old workflows. Our whole goal is automating the workforce, and using math to create optimal shift schedules is our first step.
Andrew and I will be hanging around here for the day - if you have any question about Staffjoy or YC Fellowship we’re happy to answer them!
We have primarily been focused on startups. This means that we have had people sign up with 20 workers, then end up with >200 after a few months.
We're finding that it takes at 30 workers to recognize the automation benefits and cost savings. Workers also need to be treated equivalently in terms of skill. So, a small restaurant workforce where people change roles every day may not be the best fit.
We think that call centers, fulfillment companies, and retail stores are good early fits. This is because they need different people at different times, and the number of people they need changes throughout the day.
We're working on finalizing pricing and packaging right now. If you have specific questions, I can send over a quote for your business -> team@staffjoy.com
You don't mention whether your approach is rule-based or constraint-based. I'd certainly recommend the latter as it allows a bunch of factors to be considered which are really preferences rather than absolute requirements.
It seems that the preferences quoted above (wanting two consecutive days off, minimum rest time etc) are examples of a potentially broad range of factors which typically differ across organisations, or even individuals. They may also change over time or be subject to external events such as a major emergency or building power outage.
Resource planning is a broad and long-established field going back to the dawn of IT. My take is that, while another good planning tool is welcome, the main obstacle is in businesses understanding the problem and what IT can do to help rather than a lack of solutions.
Our approach to educating users is to treat our software as "autopilot" - they don't have to understand the complexities of resource planning, timing, etc.
For optaplanner specifically - I am not too familiar, but I believe that the scheduling that they do is block-based, whereas ours dynamically adjust shift lengths. This lets us change the coverage hour-by-hour.
Have you looked at going into the healthcare industry in particular?
I've been working in the patient scheduling space for almost ten years, and people are constantly complaining about the sorry state of staff scheduling in every part of a hospital.
Healthcare tends to be an infuriatingly unique industry, which means lots of client hand-holding and industry-specific product concessions, but the flip side is that healthcare is a great sandbox to play in - large enough to build a decent business, but specialized enough that you can be a market leader with a relatively small number of customers.
Hit me up if this sets off your spider sense, I'd love to talk offline.
Medical scheduling is a fascinating place with unique constraints. AnalyticsMD from last winter's Y Combinator class did an amazing job of building a forecasting system for emergency rooms.
We are interested in beginning Staffjoy deployments at outpatient medical facilities immediately. Operating in an actual hospital likely has unique constraints that we do not support right now.
Down the line though, the medical industry seems like an excellent fit for our product vision!
My question is, does the API allow me to automate scheduling within my own application? We schedule jobs each day, instead of scheduling shifts or hourly based work. Also, I'm curious about pricing. Thanks.
We have not published much documentation about our API, but all of our applications run on it. We'll be expanding the documentation soon.
Shoot us an email and we can discuss an integration and pricing! team@staffjoy.com
Shoot us an email and I'm happy to provide a quote for your particular case!
We accommodate workers by only scheduling them when they are available to work, making it easy to claim available shifts, and algorithmically-enforcing things like enough rest time and consecutive days off.
Sure, it's fair to pay for the hours you've worked, but tracking every minute of work could be overwhelming.
I'm pretty sure that's something many managers would do.
A lot of people think that, yes. I've seen it happen to some of my friends. They can't plan their lives more than a week ahead. It's emotionally draining.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-hour_contract
To be fair, this app seems to allow the employees to specify their preferred working hours too. I wonder how it's generally used in practice.
An option to enforce scheduling to be fixed at least n days in advance would protect the employees, but that goes against the entire point of the app.
Reading again, it looks like your app prioritizes the employees' preferences over the employers desires when resolving the schedule; that makes sense. You could set yourself to "not working wednesdays" and then safely organize social stuff on wednesdays. The problem starts when you dont have that right, as many workers in the UK now don't.
On our Manager App, there is a setting for configuring when we generate a schedule relative to the work week. We've seen users be able to increase this number over time as they get better at forecasting.
Most of our users right now are on-demand startups, and with contractors that means that availability is a hard constraint. As we begin to onboard more employee-based businesses, I expect that we will focus on asking workers for their preferences in place of availability.
We're trying to make the software as worker-friendly as possible.
We're doing this by:
* Letting workers choose when they want to work
* Giving consecutive days off - If a worker has at least two days off in a week, our algorithm tries to schedule two of those days off consecutively.
* Rest Time - Managers configure a minimum time between shifts through worker profiles, and we enforce this while creating schedules to make sure that workers have enough time to rest between shifts. This can be used to prevent "clopens".
For contractors - we have some customers operating in a "claimed shifts" mode where we generate unassigned shifts, then workers claim them: https://help.staffjoy.com/docs/claimed-shifts-mode
Medium and large-sized businesses known that scheduling is hard and they are willing to pay for a good solution.