Building the ScheduleContinue tour >>

Once you have set up your people (individuals, households, groups), roles, and events, you can start constructing your schedule. SmartRoster makes this easy, but even more important, it can automatically do most of the work for you. The Automatic Scheduler is SmartRoster's most powerful feature, the one that really sets it apart from the competition.

The first step in creating schedules is to set the time period to be covered by the schedules. There is no limit as to the size of the duration you can set - a day, a month, or a year - SmartRoster doesn't care!

Manual Schedule Allocation

You can manually assign people to the schedules by drag-and-dropping them from the Role Members list or from the People panel. Do this before running the automatic scheduler when you want to fix a person to a schedule position, thus preventing the automatic scheduler from assigning that position.

You can also just to drag and drop names from one cell to another - just like a spreadsheet! Or hold down the control key while dropping to copy the name.

Also, just move the mouse cursor over a name, and SmartRoster will highlight that name every where it appears in the schedule!

Locking down schedule entries

You may manually allocate some or all events for a role (such as the Speaker role for a Church Service, which would rarely be automatically allocated) and you may even allocate all roles for some events (like a special memorial service or holiday). SmartRoster allows you to lock in a whole row, column, or cell at a time, or name in a cell. Auto Fill will not re-allocate cells that are locked.

Automatic schedule generation To automatically assign people to all of your schedules, select Auto Fill from the Schedules menu. In the Auto Fill Options dialog box you can set the Auto Fill priorities (what to optimise) and end point (when to stop). The Automatic Scheduler will then start generating great, non-conflicting schedules. It will keep trying to improve the schedule untill the end point is reached. You can stop it at any time and make any minor adjustments and changes you want, including locking down part of the schedule and restaring the scheduler. The Automatic Scheduler will assign all time slots not already assigned and locked in. It will attempt to satisfy as many preferences as possible while also meeting usage targets and filling vacancies (how many required in each role/event combination).

Scheduler Quality Measures

The quality of a generated schedule depends on how many preferences it satisfies and how close it comes to meeting usage targets (how evenly it distributes roles to role members)

You can use these measures to quickly see if a solution has improved, and in what way it was improved.