In Time and Attendance (TAA), you can create official schedules for your employees and compare their planned work to the actual work they performed on their time card. Schedules are necessary if your school district wants to implement the Dispatch Monitor to monitor how well your routes are covered. (See Verifying That Your Routes Are Covered Using the Dispatch Monitor for more details.) You can assign master schedule templates to groups of employees (if you're not importing the templates); after a master schedule is assigned, the schedule becomes unique to each employee and can be adjusted individually as needed.
There are two different methods of adding schedules to CalAmp K-12: manually creating them and using your Comparative Analysis (CA) import to pull them in based on your planned routes. (The latter of course requires that your school district have the CA module.) The manual approach is covered in the first section; you can skip down to the second section, "The Process If You Are Importing Your Master Schedule Templates," if you want to import your schedule templates.
Note: The Work Monitor offers considerably more data about how well your drivers are covering their routes when you have created master schedule templates and applied them to your employees. See the articles in the folder Work Monitor for details.
The Process If You Are Manually Creating Your Master Schedule Templates
To best use schedules when you are creating the templates by hand, you should follow these steps in order:
- Make sure that you have your employees' current work schedules handy, whether this is in another software program or on paper.
- Identify schedules that are mostly similar in their shift hours and have the same TAA job type; then categorize all of them.
For example, you might have several drivers who run a morning elementary-school route, a morning middle-school route, the corresponding afternoon elementary-school route, and finally the afternoon route for that middle school. You could categorize this general schedule as "Elementary/Middle School." Another set of drivers might perform the morning and afternoon routes for a middle school and a high school, and that schedule could be "Middle School/High School."
Think in terms of the hours when they will be driving. You are looking for general time frames, such as 6:15 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Time periods alone might be how you categorize your schedules, such as "Early Morning and Early Afternoon."
You might also consider categories based on position, such as if you have a group of mechanics that works the early-day shift and another that works second shift; their schedules might be named "Mechanic 1" and "Mechanic 2."
If the time period is the same but the job type that will be performed is different, make those two separate categories. (This will simplify part of step 3 below because you will be able to build the first master schedule template for one job and then copy and modify that template for the second job.)
Choose categories that make the most sense for your organization.
Note: Don't worry if the drivers' schedules aren't exactly the same. You want to create master schedules that have mostly the same shifts. If individual drivers have slight variances to the master schedule that's applied to them, their schedule can be tweaked, as mentioned in step 5 below.
Caution: Be aware that drivers can have only ONE schedule assigned to them. So don't try to create separate schedules for morning and afternoon shifts, thinking you will be able to assign both to a single driver. Each employee will need a schedule that includes all their morning, mid-day, and afternoon shifts. - Create your master schedule templates, naming them by the categories you delineated in step 2. See Creating a Master Schedule Template for details.
Add all the schedule templates you will need for your employees, one by one (category by category).
- Assign each master schedule template to the group of employees who work the shifts it contains, as shown in Assigning Schedules to Employees. Note that you can give a schedule to multiple employees at once.
- If there are shift hour variations for some of your workers or if you want to add each driver's assigned vehicle to their shift record, you can modify the schedules individually, employee by employee, by following the steps in Editing an Employee's Schedule.
The Process If You Are Importing Your Master Schedule Templates
Caution: Again, in order to import your schedules, your school district must have the CA module and use its nightly import feature to pull your itinerary/vehicle data into CalAmp K-12.
You can import your master schedules based on your routes as follows:
- Follow the steps in the Importing Master Schedule Templates article.
After your next nightly CA import, you will see several new master schedule templates in the Select Master Template drop-down list of the Master Schedule Templates screen. These will have the same name as your routes, plus your designated import prefix(es).
- One employee at a time, assign each master schedule template to the employee who works the itinerary it is based on, as shown in Assigning Schedules to Employees.
Caution: Be aware that drivers can have only ONE schedule assigned to them.
You won't need to assign vehicles in the employee schedules because they will already be included in the master schedule template (as the templates were based on vehicle itineraries).
- If you have any other shift hour variations for some of your workers, you can modify the schedules individually, employee by employee, by following the steps in Editing an Employee's Schedule.
Caution: If you need to make changes to a master schedule template that has been imported, DO NOT follow the steps in the article Editing a Master Schedule Template, unless you copy and rename the template. (If the name is the same as it was previously, your next nightly import will overwrite your template with the previously existing data.) If schedule changes are actually ROUTE changes, instead, work with your route planning system to make the modifications. When they change the file that is imported into CalAmp K-12, the template will be updated.
If employees have already had the master template assigned to them, your updates will not carry over to their work schedules; their schedules will have the shifts exactly as they were before. You'll need to assign the schedule to them again for the modified template to appear on their time cards, as shown in Assigning Schedules to Employees.