Generate a New Schedule

CXone WFM uses input from a staffing plan to generate a schedule, whether you forecasted a staffing plan or used one you imported yourself. The created schedules appear in the Schedule Manager.

A generated schedule is based on several key pieces of data:

  • Staffing requirements: Based on the staffing plan.

  • Organizational requirements: Scheduling units, agents and their skills, weekly rules, etc.

  • Agent requirements: To be included in the schedule, agents must:

    • Be assigned to a daily or multi-skill weekly rule

    • Have WEM skills assigned to them. It's recommended that agents don't have more than 8 to 10 skills assigned to them. More than this can make the schedule generation to fail to generate slowly.

  • User preferences: Agent availability and shift preferences, as well as agent rank and seniority.

  • Proficiency levels: You can define the agent proficiency agent proficiency level of each skill.

You can click Download Report to get the process report of the generation process.

The process report is a helpful way to understand a summary of the schedule generation. The process report can be a helpful resource to troubleshoot anything that may have gone wrong during the generation. The top line of the report provides a short summary of the success level of the schedule generation. The rest of the report points out exceptions, such as:

  • Agents missing skills

  • Skills without any requirements

  • Skills that don’t have agents attached to them

After generating a schedule, you still have to Publish it before your agents will see it.

Existing schedules during the selected period will be overridden when you generate the new schedule. In addition, schedules for dates without any forecast data will not reflect demand requirements. In both cases, you can choose to generate the schedule anyway.

To generate a new schedule:

  1. Click the app selector and select CXone WFM.

  2. Go to Scheduling > Generate Schedule.

  3. Click Generate New Schedules.

    You can generate a schedule from either of the staffing inputs:

    • Pre generated forecast

    • Importing a staffing plan(CSV)

  4. Select Generated Forecast or Manual Planning (CSV), depending on the staffing input you want to use.

  5. To generate multi-skill schedules, select the Use multi-skill scheduling checkbox. Multi-skill scheduling takes agent skills into account when creating schedules, and uses a forecast to simulate schedule needs. For more information, see Multi-Skill Scheduling Rules.

    If you select the multi-skill scheduling checkbox and do not have any agents assigned to multi-skill rules, no schedules will be generated.

  6. Select Advance rotation if you are generating schedules with rotation rules and want to advance the rotation between agent schedules. For more information, see Rotation Rules.

  7. Select the Scheduling units that you are generating a schedule for.

    You can select one or more units. Each unit's schedule will run as a separate job.

  8. Select a Start date, and the duration of the schedule. You can generate a schedule for up to four weeks.

    Selecting the duration automatically provides the end date of the schedule.

  9. Click Generate.

    Keep in mind, generating a schedule can take a while.

    Here are the statuses in the order they occur:

    • Validation failed: When you generate the schedule, the first step is validation. This step checks that your schedule has no conflicts or setting issues. For example, you can select to generate a schedule for a scheduling unit that doesn't have any agents assigned to it.

      If this happens, click on View Errors link to open the Error Summary page. Use the Error Summary page to view the errors. There, you can see what settings need to be updated.

    • Failed: After validation, the generator starts creating schedules. This status occurs if each agent in the selected scheduling unit can’t be scheduled. If this happens, click on Download Report to get the process report. The process report gives details of all agents included in the generation process. Review and correct the reasons why the agents weren’t scheduled and try again.

    • Failed to store schedules: This happens when there are no scheduling conflicts, but the system couldn't finish the process. In this case, try to generate the schedule again.

    • Succeeded with warnings: Just like the Failed status, this happens after the validation step. It means that some of the agents in the scheduling unit weren't scheduled. If this happens, click on Download Report to get the process report. The process report provides details about all agents included in the generation process. Review and correct the reasons why the agents weren’t scheduled and try again.

      Keep in mind, it's possible either only a few agents didn't get scheduled or that most didn't. For example, the scheduling unit has 100 agents. In one case, you can get this status if five agents don't get scheduled. In another case, you get this status when 99 agents weren’t scheduled.

    • Succeeded: When the validation step was completed successfully, and that schedules were generated for all agents in the scheduling unit.

Depending on the complexity of the schedule, generating it may take several minutes, but you can view the status of the job on the Automatic Schedule Generator page.

Only once the job has finished running will the schedule be added to the Schedule Manager.

Remember to publish the schedule if you want to send it to your agents.