What is the staffing guide? 

The staffing guide is a recommendation of how many labor hours to schedule each day for each department. 

Once activated, it can be viewed as the green lines in the graphs of each labor cockpit.  Users with Administrator rights can activate this via the tools icon in the cockpit.

How is it calculated? 

The staffing guide uses Machine Learning (ML) to calculate how many productive hours are needed per day based on the forecasted activity at the hotel, depending on the day of the week, the season and trends. SMART Forecast uses Machine Learning (ML) to recognize trends from previous periods and allocate the hours appropriately.  Due to COVID-19, historic data from March, 2020 up to (and including) February, 2022 are disregarded when analyzing historic data to predict future trends.

It ignores any manually set productivity, forecasted hours and/or min and max staffing. Instead, it calculates an auto min and max based on the historic trends identified. This can be viewed via the tooltips in the graphs.

This differs from the SMART forecast which shows how many hours you can use to meet your productivity or hours forecast. 

The Staffing guide uses the determined FTE in PMI (if it has been enabled in the cockpit’s settings) to suggest daily hours in brackets of 0.5 FTE. It will thereby never suggest hours that means someone should work 10 % of a full day.

What is its purpose? 

There are 2 main purposes of the staffing guide: 

1. To evaluate the past staffing levels to identify if they are frequently over/understaffed on specific weekdays or activity levels, and,  

2. Ensure that the future schedule is aligned with the current need (which is based on the expected activity levels). 

It can also be used to help set productivity forecasts for future months. If you are not sure what a realistic productivity forecast for your department will be, use the staffing guide as a starting point.