The cost of delivering higher education continues to skyrocket. Yet, many universities and colleges are forced to operate with shrinking operating budgets. One way to serve students uninterrupted is to integrate employee scheduling with vendors.
While reimagining strategies for getting the most out of budgeting dollars, begin taking a closer look at the use of current resources. Vendors play an important role with peripheral and essential services. It is a good idea to keep these partnerships running a smoothly as possible.
When it comes to creating employee schedules, you most likely have a host of requirements related to staffing and communication. The long list of different departments, student workers, professors and administrative staff makes it challenging to manage each schedule.
Additionally, you may also face balancing proper staff coverage. Recruiting and hiring the best people is one area. Another is catering to a student workforce that changes every semester. Employee scheduling software can help streamline the process while strengthening vendor relationships.
Improve Employee Engagement with Better Schedules
Using a scheduling solution, you can be one of many university administrations that experience greater engagement with students and permanent staff. In addition, an automated software system increases productivity and workforce efficiency.
Real-time access allows faculty and department managers to see who is scheduled for each shift. The system tracks how many hours employees and students work. This type of information keeps department heads within budget ranges for labour costs.
Besides tracking budgets, greater workforce visibility also helps employees and students. They can set their availability preferences. They can also implement shift trades with fellow employees.
Increasing your employees’ ability to participate in the scheduling process makes it more likely that they will come to work. Fewer call outs mean fewer roles are left unmanned.
Moreover, improving work schedules help with vendor interactions. The familiarity of consistently working with the same person strengthens relationships.
By using scheduling software to communicate with staff, you help to create a productive institution with:
- Access to schedules on campus or at home
- Avoidance of schedule conflicts and misunderstandings
- Ensuring quality education with appropriately assigned professors
- Viewing availability of all employees and student workers
- Mass notification of schedule changes
Equally important is what you can do when inevitable changes occur. People get sick and students have to study for exams. Staff scheduling software for universities gives you the ability to fill those gaps with features such as standby lists and text alerts for available shifts.
Smarter Scheduling Impacts Vendor Relationships
An employee scheduling solution can have a positive impact on your university’s bottom line. The easy-to-use online system increases satisfaction among employees in every department. Integrating the system with vendor processes is an added bonus.
Immediate schedule access and easy communication methods for broadcasting changes ensure employees get the most out of the system. For instance, you may need hundreds of students to work during sporting events.
Scheduling requirements include balancing availability with work hour limits and event frequency. A manual process for scheduling can make this unwieldy and inaccurate. Employee scheduling software helps to simplify what would otherwise be a chaotic process.
Student employees can view upcoming events and hours to match their availability. This keeps them more engaged with options to trade shifts if necessary.
In the same way, an employee scheduling system can help with back-office operations. Typically, you have processes such as:
- Inventory management
- Accounts payable
- Accounts receivable
- Purchasing
A standalone system can become problematic with inconsistent practices. Alternatively, a fully integrated system can seamlessly communicate with outside vendor systems. Eventually, this proves to be a cost-effective way to handle orders and payments.
Integrating your employee scheduling system with vendors is making good use of technology. Your university will see:
- Streamlined operations
- Error reduction or elimination
- Time and financial savings
- A stronger bottom line
Here are four reasons why integration offers incredible opportunities.
1. Eliminate Errors and Reduce Administrative Burdens
Relying on a variety of standalone systems means your employees are checking in many places just to do different tasks. This places a lot of burden on staff. It also exposes your operations to errors.
With a fully integrated scheduling system, all employees are working from up-to-date data flows. In general, this helps to strengthen workflow and improves overall accuracy.
Also, your employees can use more brain power to focus on profit-driven tasks when they are not distracted by back office busywork.
2. Optimize Vendor Performance
Integrating data helps to reveal trends and patterns. Your employees have tangible data at the fingertips about different vendors. They can view which vendors are late or deliver damaged goods. Data also shows when incomplete or inaccurate orders are delivered.
Likewise, employees can also determine the vendors who are always on time, have the best pricing and regularly exceed expectations. Equipped with this information, your staff can do a better job of managing vendor relationships.
Integrating workforce scheduling software positions your staff to negotiate better pricing. They can reevaluate vendors based on performance. Essentially, employees can take advantage of things such as discounts or bulk pricing to stretch the spending budget.
3. Schedule the Right People at the Right Time
Another way integrating systems can have a major impact is with improving the scheduling process. This is one necessary but time-consuming task. Done incorrectly, you get disgruntled students and regular employees.
With the right employee scheduling tool, department managers can match the right people with the right roles. Utilising scheduling software removes the guesswork out of building shifts. Software systems allow you to add skill sets to align with department needs.
4. Get Clear Insights
Cobbling different back-office systems together makes it harder to optimise workflows. Data sharing is not the same. While you might be able to share some information, it is impossible to have a full picture of what is going on.
As a result, your university can miss opportunities by getting ahead of trends. Also, accurate reporting is not a guarantee. Instead of belabouring employees with a tangle of systems, a fully integrated solution provides clearer insights.
Employees can access data with a few clicks. More importantly, the data they use leads to more informed decisions.
Regardless of the size of your institution, integrating employee scheduling with vendors just makes sense. First, examine current components. Next, begin working towards an integrated solution that links internal processes with outside vendors.
Why Scheduling Systems Work for Higher Education
Your university can join other higher education institutions in reaping the benefits of an integrated employee scheduling system. Typically, software programs are effective across campuses for:
- Libraries
- Performing arts centres
- Campus security
- Academic department
- Residence halls
- Athletic venues
Each department has varying scheduling needs. However, all departments work together to enhance the student experience. Making sure that outside vendors who support daily operations are on the same page is essential.
