A large logistics company requires a software system to support the business processes associated with managing shift patterns of employees and making the associated payments. The company operates warehouses across the country. The warehouses work on three shifts of eight hours each with a 45 minutes break at a fixed time during the shift. Shifts rotate so that employees work one month on each shift with one week off before moving to a new shift.
Each shift has a shift manager. One of the responsibilities of the shift manager is ensuring that there is adequate staffing for each shift. Shift managers co-ordinate with each other to achieve this.
On any given shift, there is the opportunity for overtime. Overtime is available to cover illnesses, holidays and peak times (when there is more work to do) and may occur before or after the normal shift pattern hours. The payroll department calculates weekly payments to employees based on the normal shift hours on each day in addition to overtime payments. Payment is calculated and transferred on Fridays.
Company policy is to ensure that all employees are treated equitably. In terms of overtime this means that shift leaders need to make sure that they offer overtime fairly to all employees. Shift managers therefore need to be able to maintain a record of the current pattern of overtime but also the staffing patterns across the shifts as a whole.
To overcome the problems of managing this business process the company has invested in a Radio Frequency IDentity (RFID) system. Employees will carry an identify card which has an embedded 'chip' containing their employee identify number. When they enter or leave the warehouse, the ID is captured by the RFID system. This front-end technology is outside the scope of this project. However, the RFID system produces a data file that forms the interface with the proposed employee management system. The RFID system updates a file each time an employee entry or departure event occurs. This file takes the form of a simple ASCII text based comma separated list containing the employee ID, date and time of the entry or departure event. An entry in the file is formatted as follows:
001002,12102010,1242
The company requires a software system that will allow shift leaders to manage overtime and core hours to allow the policy of equity to be achieved and to support payroll in making automatic payments to employees based on their working hours.