Do Not Consider If Fully Unavailable ADS Update
The purpose of this program is to enable ADS to not consider employees that are fully unavailable. If half of a district’s employees are fully unavailable before the morning call out even starts, ADS can skip those employees entirely which should drastically improve searching performance. Further, if an employee is not fully unavailable, it can put employees in ‘last worked’ or ‘last phoned’ order so that employees that haven’t worked or been phoned recently will be at the top of the list. The last worked/phoned updating part of this program should only be used when seniority isn’t part of the rotation. Running this program on the system each morning before the morning call out should speed up the replacement search.
This program will analyze each replacement employee for the specified asof date, and check to see if they are:
- Fully unavailable
- Fully dispatched
- Fully scheduled to work (assignments)
- Name not recorded
- Opted out of ADS
Fully Unavailable:
An employee is considered fully unavailable if they have unavailability in atrieveHR (11,3,4) where it:
- starts on or before the end date, and ends of or after the as of date, AND
- is marked as a ‘F’ull day
- starts on or before 4 am and ends on 23:59
- has at least one AM unavailability and one PM unavailability on the asof date
Fully Dispatched
To determine if an employee is fully dispatched, it will total up all of the dispatches for the asof date, and see if it is >= the specified units. If you accept the default of .85 units, then the employee will be considered fully dispatched (and therefore unavailable) if they have a total of .85 units or more. For dispatch groups that use FTE units, make sure you enter FTE units into this value; if hours, enter hours.
Fully Scheduled To Work (Assignments)
To determine if an employee is fully scheduled to work, it will total up all of the assigned schedule units for the as of date, and see if is >= the specified units.
Name Not Recorded
This is where the employee’s name hasn’t been voice-recorded in ADS.
Opted Out of ADS
If an employee has a “A”,”S” or ”Y” in the user-defined field designated as the ADS opt-out field, they will be considered to have ‘opted out of ADS call outs’. These values mean:
- A=Opt out of all dispatches
- S=Opt out of Same-Day dispatches
- Y=Opt Out of Same-Day Dispatches and Future Dispatches Except Ones You're Requested For
These values are entered via Telephone Change in the web portal, or via Employee Demographics, page 3 (1,1,2). The field that controls what user-defined field is use is: 11,4,2,2 Dispatch Search Parameters page 4 field 3. Dev is currently configured to use user-defined field 11.
Note: This program only works for the morning call out because the morning call outs only attempt to fill absences that start that day. That allows this program to check the availability of employees for that one day. The evening call out by contrast, can fill absences for any future date, making it impossible to mark an employee as being fully unavailable – because we don’t know what date to check.
So, the way that this program marks the employee to not be considered, is by putting a date/timestamp value onto the SORT_KEY/rotation field on both the substitute/casual preference record, and on each of its subject/level indexes. The date/timestamp is ‘<YYYYMMDD>240100000’ where YYYYMMDD is the As Of Date, which is by default the current system date.
As Of Date
Enter the date you want the program to process. Unavailability will be checked for this date when determining whether an employee should be marked as ‘do not consider’.
Dispatch Groups
You must enter at least one dispatch group here. Only employees belonging to the specified dispatch group(s) will be selected. Employees that belong to more than one dispatch group will only have their main dispatch group’s sub/cas preference/index records updated.
Preference Subjects
You can optionally select just employees with specified subjects on their substitute/casual preferences (11,6,2).
Preference Subject Levels
You can optionally select just employees with specified subject levels on their substitute/casual preferences (11,6,2).
Update Mode
Possible selections include:
- 1=Do Not Consider If Fully Unavailable
- 1P=Do Not Consider …, Then Last Phoned
- 1W=Do Not Consider …, Then Last Worked
- 2=Make Available By Clearing Rotation
- 3=Update Rotation With Last Phoned
- 4=Update Rotation With Last Worked
- 5=Do Not Consider Regardless Of Unavailable
1=Do Not Consider If Fully Unavailable
This mode will analyze employees to see if they are ‘fully unavailable’. If they are, the employee’s substitute/casual preference record and associated ADS indexes will be marked with YYYYMMDD240100000. If they are not ‘fully unavailable’, their SORT_KEY/rotation will NOT be changed.
1P=Do Not Consider …, Then Last Phoned
This mode will analyze employees to see if they are ‘fully unavailable’. If they are, the employee’s substitute/casual preference record and associated ADS indexes will be marked with YYYYMMDD240100000. If they are not ‘fully unavailable’, their SORT_KEY/rotation will be updated with the last phoned date stored on their substitute/casual preference record.
1W=Do Not Consider …, Then Last Worked
This mode will analyze employees to see if they are ‘fully unavailable’. If they are, the employee’s substitute/casual preference record and associated ADS indexes will be marked with YYYYMMDD240100000. If they are not ‘fully unavailable’, their SORT_KEY/rotation will be updated with the date they were last dispatched (on or before the specified asof date). You can run the Employee Dispatch Report 11,1,5,1 to see the dispatches for any employee.
2=Make Available By Clearing Rotation
This mode allows you to clear the rotation for all selected employees. Regardless of what’s in the rotation field, this program will clear it out, which will ensure that the selected employee are considered and appropriately called by ADS.
3=Update Rotation With Last Phoned
This mode allows you to update the rotation with the last phoned date that is currently stored on the employee substitute/casual preference record.
4=Update Rotation With Last Worked
This mode allows you to update the rotation with the last worked date – which is taken from their latest dispatch on or before the As Of Date.
5=Do Not Consider Regardless Of Unavailable
This mode allows you to update the rotation with YYYYMMDD240100000 – which will cause the selected employees to NOT be considered as part of the morning call out for the As Of Date.
If you entered modes that check to see if the employee is fully unavailable (1, 1P or 1W), you will be able to enter values into the below fields:
Fully Unavailable
Enter Y here to instruct the program to check the employee’s unavailability. Enter N to ignore unavailability.
Fully Dispatched
Enter Y here to instruct the program to check the employee’s dispatches. Enter N to ignore dispatches.
If Units >=
If you entered Y to the Fully Dispatched prompt, you need to enter a units value here. Only employees that have dispatches totalling greater than or equal to units you specify here will be considered ‘fully dispatched’. If you enter .85 here, then only employees whose total dispatches for the as of date are greater or equal to .85 will be considered fully dispatched.
Scheduled To Work (Assignments)
Enter Y here to instruct the program to check the employee’s assignment schedules. Enter N to ignore assignment schedules.
If Units >=
If you entered Y to the Scheduled To Work prompt, you need to enter a units value here. Only employees that have schedules totalling greater than or equal to units you specify here will be considered ‘fully scheduled’. If you enter .85 here, then only employees whose total schedules for the as of date are greater or equal to .85 will be considered fully scheduled.
Name Not Recorded
Enter Y here to instruct the program to check the employee’s ADS recording status. Enter N to ignore the ADS recording status.
Opted Out Of ADS
Enter Y here to instruct the program to check the employee’s ADS Opt Out Status. Enter N to ignore the ADS Opt Out Status.
Update District Preferred List
Enter Y to update the priority field of the district preferred list (P1) with the YYYYMMDD240100000 so that fully unavailable employees will be skipped on that list as well. Please test ADS to ensure that employees with a priority of YYYYMMDD24010000 on their phase one list are skipped.
All or Selected Employees
Enter A for all employees (within the groups, subjects and levels selected above). Enter S to select specific employees.
Employee Number
Enter the numbers of the employees you want to specifically select.
Preliminary/Final Run
Enter P for preliminary mode. Preliminary mode will display the report without updating the SORT_KEY/rotation.
Enter F for final mode. Final mode will display the report AND update the SORT_KEY/rotation.
Enter D for debug mode. Debug mode will force the program to run in preliminary mode and display debug lines on the report to help with troubleshooting.
Important Note: The YYYYMMDD240100000 marker on the employee’s sub/cas preference rotation field (and related indexes) will cause employees not to be called during the morning call out (only) on the as of date. They will still be called during the afternoon/evening call out later that day. They will also be called during the next days morning call out UNLESS this program runs again, to update the YYYYMMDD240100000 value with the next day’s asof date.
It is important to schedule this program to run before the morning call out starts, yet as close to it as possible so that the ‘fully unavailable’ status is as ‘current’ as possible, while still ensuring it has time enough to complete before ADS starts calling out.
If an employee is marked as ‘do not consider’ because they are fully unavailable for any reason during this process, nothing the employee can do can cause them to be called by ADS again (for the current morning call out), short of someone at the district office changing or clearing out that rotation. This program can do that by running for selected employees, or using the ‘LAST’ option in sub/cas preference changes will also do that.
Of course we know that any of these factors (unavailability, dispatches, schedules, name recording status and ads opt out status) can theoretically change at any time. If the employee changes their unavailability 5 minutes after the call out starts, but they have been previously marked as ‘do not consider’ because they were fully unavailable at the time this program ran, they will still NOT be called by ADS.
The thing most likely to change last minute is the employee’s unavailability. The other factors are usually set up once and left, or entered by the district staff, who aren’t going to be modifying employee’s current schedules during the early morning call out time.
The report will show you the employee’s name, reason the employee is fully unavailable (if they are), the previous sort key, new sort key, is district preferred and whether the sort key has changed.
Unavailable Reasons include:
- OPTED OUT OF ADS
- NAME IS NOT RECORDED
- DISPATCHED FOR A FULL DAY
- UNAVAILABLE FOR THE FULL DAY
- ASSIGNMENT SCHEDULED FOR THE FULL DAY
- USING SUB/CAS LAST PHONED DATE
- USING LAST DISPATCHED DATE
- USING BLANK BECAUSE CLEARING OPTION CHOSEN – when mode 2=Make Available By Clearing Rotation is used
- DO NOT CONSIDER REGARDLESS – when mode 5=Do Not Consider Regardless Of Unavailable is used.
Is District Preferred values include:
- Preferred
- Not Prefer
- Not Checked – if the Update District Preferred List prompt is not Y.
Sort Key Has Changed values include:
- No Change – the newly calculated sort key/rotation value is the same as the previous value, and so will not be updated if you run in final mode
- Key Changed – the newly calculated sort key/rotation value is different than the previous value, and so will be updated if you run in final mode