Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Iggles · ‎09-09-2021

I'd like to make a rota which takes into account the availability of the employees. I've tried searching for "rota" but not found anything. I tried searching for "schedule" but that doesn't help for obvious reasons!

I'm not entirely sure this is appropriate for Alteryx but I remember a demonstration of the Optimization tool at Inspire and thought it might work. Unfortunately the Optimization tool's guide is a bit beyond me; my eyes start going funny when I read the words, "mixed integer linear programming".

A simple example would be: we have four employees and need three to work on every weekday in February. The working days are from Monday, 1 February - Friday, 26 February. I want Amy, Barry, Claire and Darren to have an equal number of shifts - or as close as possible.

Amy can't work on Mondays
Barry can't work from 1st - 5th inclusive
Claire can't work 13th - 24th inclusive
Darren can work any day

What I was hoping is that there's a way of plugging in the days that need to be worked (or a range) and the availability and Alteryx would magically give which three employees should work on each day.

Is this possible? Thanks for reading!

OllieClarke · ‎09-09-2021

Hey @Iggles check out this blog by @BenMoss: Return to Work Timetable which covers a very similar problem 🙂

csmith11 · ‎09-09-2021

Hi @Iggles

I'm not too familiar with the optimization tool. But i was able to put together a same proof of concept regarding the Rota you were looking to create.

Despite the name i assigned to my workflow, I did not leverage the optimization tool.

Instead, I put together a macro to randomly assign each employee to a date when they are available to work. Which employee is chosen for the next assignment is based on the # of total shifts not yet assigned. The total # of shifts assigned to each employee is set out in the initial criteria input file.