Schedule Change Acknowledgement

Owned by Gurpreet Banwait (Deactivated)
Last updated: Jul 08, 2018 by Michael Shumko
6 min read

April 2017
For eTime Version 8.0.4


Table of Contents
Overview
Prerequisites
Setup the Schedule Change Acknowledgment feature
Schedule Change Acknowledgment Report

Overview


The Schedule Change Acknowledgment feature allows employees to be notified when changes have been made to a shift which they have been assigned to. If a shift is added, deleted or the details are changed then the employee will be notified or they can view the change in the Changes module in the Team Xpress mobile app. The employee is required to acknowledge the change, and the Supervisor/Scheduler can track who has or has not acknowledged the shifts by running a report in eTime Xpress.

Prerequisites


The Team Xpress mobile app must be license. Celayix must enable the feature in eTime Xpress. Readers of this user guide should be familiar with eTime Xpress and Team Xpress products. Separate user guides are available for these products.

Setup the Schedule Change Acknowledgment feature


  1. Navigate to Branch Notifications –
    • Click on Configuration
      • Company/Branch
        • Branch
          • Branch Settings
            • Branch Notifications


The Schedule Change Acknowledgment is turned Off by default. Double click on 'OFF' under Status (1) to change it to ON and this enables that notifications are sent out. If this is set to Off then the user will be able to see changes to the shifts in the application but they will not receive any notifications.

 


  1. To log shift changes for reporting purposes, ensure the option 'Enable Schedule Change Tracking' is checked as above indicated by (2)


  1. On the Setup Tab there are 3 options that will trigger an alert:


Acknowledgement Allowed Interval – If a shift or scheduled change (deleted, updated or created shift) has not been acknowledged 14 days prior to the start of the shift then the employee will be able to see the change in the application Team Xpress in the Schedule area under Changes. They will not be sent an alert in this period but they are able to acknowledge the change via Team Xpress. Refer to the Team Xpress user guide for details on how to acknowledge the shift
This field is editable by clicking on the update icon and changing the value. This value must be greater than Acknowledgment required interval.
Acknowledgement Required Interval - If a shift or scheduled change (deleted, updated or created shift) has not yet been acknowledged 7 days prior to the start of the shift, the employee will receive an alert notifying the employee that there are changes in their schedule which are still not acknowledged. The alert will display the changes and will instruct how to review and acknowledged
This field is editable by clicking on the update icon and changing the value. This value must be greater than Acknowledgment missed interval.
Acknowledgement Missed Interval – If a shift or schedule change (deleted, updated or created shift) is within 3 days of the start of the shift and has not yet been acknowledged by one or more employees, the employees' supervisor/scheduler will receive an alert. The alert will display the unacknowledged shifts and schedule changes grouped by employee and include employee contact information.
**The Acknowledgement Missed Interval is not available in the 8.0.4 release, and will be introduced in a future release**


  1. Tracking Fields are the shift related fields that will be tracked for changes to determine if the employee needs to be notified; there are seven core fields but additional fields from the Additional Fields section can be added.

Click on the Add button to move across additional fields.




  1. It is possible to display or hide specific fields. For example, if the shift end time needs to be hidden from the employee in Team Xpress, then this field can be set to hidden in the Schedule Change Notification. This is achieved by unchecking the box next to the field. If unchecked, the fields will still be used for tracking whether the employee needs to be notified.

  1. Employee Tab – This section determines which distribution methods are used. Currently only the Employee Email and Employee SMS are available. They can be enabled independently of each other.


N.B For an Email to be sent to an employee they must have an Email (1) entered in the Contact tab, and for the SMS to work they must have a number entered in the SMS Alert field (2), as shown below. The Alert SMS number can be different from the other two Phone numbers shown. Please note that there is a charge for SMS messages; for more details contact Celayix. See also Sending SMS messages from eTime Xpress





Check the In-app notification to Team Xpress (1)and/or the 'Employee SMS' (2) and/or the 'Employee Email' (3) to enable these features

  1. Timing – In this section you can determine the frequency for when the notifications are issued or the specific timings.

Enable the radio button Days (4) as above. This enables the days of the week; you can select the appropriate days for your organisation and the time of day (5) you would like the notifications to be issued.



  1. If 'Within the next hour' (1) is checked then notifications will be sent on the hour throughout the day until the employee acknowledges the changes.


  1. Click on the Email tab (above - 2).





A predefined message that will be emailed to the employee is displayed in the section Content (3). This message is not editable.
There is the option of entering additional information that will be displayed to the employee by entering text in the Header (4) and Footer (5) sections.
There is also the ability to add additional Email recipients in the section 'Additional Email recipient' (6) To add multiple emails, separate the email addresses by using a semi colon.


Schedule Change Acknowledgment Report

  1. There are two ways to run the report.

Click on Reports – Scheduling – Schedule Change Acknowledgement Report

OR
Right click on a shift in the Visual Scheduler:

  1. The features for this report are as follows:

  1. Specify the shift (Not the date the change was made)/shift log date range to report on
  2. Group records in a variety of ways
  3. Filter records by the major eTime Xpress elements and status
  4. Filter records by Change Type. Changes are defined as follows:
  5. "Created" means a new shift added to the database within the Acknowledgment Allowed Interval for the designated employee;
  6. "Deleted" means a shift record within the Acknowledgment Allowed Interval has been deleted;
  7. "Updated" means a change to one of the tracked fields for a shift within the Acknowledgment Allowed Interval has occurred, except where the employee ID has changed or the Shift Date has changed;
  8. "New" means a shift existed with a Shift Date previously outside of the Acknowledgment Allowed Interval. As time passes the Shift Date is now inside the Acknowledgment Allowed Interval and therefore requires acknowledgment by the employee;
  9. "Reassigned" means the Employee ID has been changed for a shift with a Shift Date inside the Acknowledgment Allowed Interval. The report will contain an entry for the original employee and the new employee;
  10. "Moved" means a shift with a date inside of the Acknowledgment Allowed Interval has had the Shift Date updated.
  11. Filter records by Acknowledgment Status.
  12. By default, the report will display summary information. With this option selected, the report will provide a detailed log of all tracked changes inside Acknowledgment Allowed Interval, including before and after values and details of the eTime Xpress user who did the changes.

N.B Log entries will be deleted two full months after the shift date.