Information Systems for Small Business Employee Scheduling

UMUC Haircuts Stage

Process Models -- Technology Solution

Strategy for Competitive Advantage: Increase customer loyalty and customer base (from advertising and foot traffic) through marketing and the assessment of the shop location and potential marketing partners.

Business Process to Improve: Employee scheduling.

Business Process Explanation

Current business process. Scheduling employees is one of the most time consuming tasks facing Myra, the owner of UMUC Haircuts. The current employee scheduling process is conducted entirely by hand. When Myra hires a new employee, she asks them to identify their availability according to three categories: 1) Best and most consistently free days and times; 2) generally free days and times; and 3) days and times reserved for personal needs. Myra makes every effort to work with her employees to optimally schedule according to their personal needs, which include time to attend classes, work a second job, and care for their children or elderly family members. Myra prides herself on hiring a diverse staff that includes parents of very young children and school age children. Every two weeks, Myra connects with each employee to learn about any potential conflicts with the schedule she has planned. This means that Myra must make changes, sometimes on the fly, as her employees life demands change. The key drivers of Myra's efforts to improve her scheduling process are: 1) Concern for her employees' family needs and second job arrangements; 2) the competitive necessity of providing services that are convenient for her customers; 3) the need to streamline the time-consuming, cumbersome, and iterative process.

Improvements Potentially Enabled by Technology Solution. Myra has been thinking about the scheduling problem for some time and wonders if it would be possible to have a scheduling software system that would permit employees to log on or in order to adjust their schedules and log in or send emails to make schedule requests. Before she owned the shop, Myra was employed as a hairstylist and her memories of scheduling headaches are all too vivid. This is a primary reason that Myra believes improving the speed and responsiveness of the scheduling system will contribute to her employees feelings of being supported and valued by Myra -- perceptions that are likely to result in better customer service by happier employees.

III. Proposed Technology Solution

Myra believes that this technological capacity would foster timely schedule change requests, and serve as encouragement to staff to track the big picture of their own scheduling needs, thereby enabling them to perceive the reasons when she must decline to make a schedule change. Myra would like to see a feature in the scheduling software that lets employees send an email making a request for a schedule changes so that, when they are not at the shop, they can send their request while they are thinking about it -- at any time day or night. This could support employees to get their requests in early, and before it slips their mind.

IV. Solution Components

Information Technology Component or Business Resource

Description of Needs to Implement the New IT Solution

Hardware, Software, Telecommunications, & Facilities

Hardware -- Standard component parts are used in this system: processor, main memory, secondary memory, power supply, and supporting hardware.

Software -- The user interface will be designed for both employee and administrative functions. The logic level of the operating system will provide file management, internet and networking facility. The hardware level of the operating system will control the memory manager, process manager, disk drivers, and so on. The graphics engine will integrate the user interface and the operating system at the logical level and the hardware level ("OSdata," 2006).

Telecommunications -- Both local connectivity and internet access will be required for this solution. The current IS plan is to use only data (not voice or video). The internet connection must be operable for the emailed schedule change requests to be received by the software scheduling system.

Facilities -- The hardware will be housed at the UMUC Haircuts. A very limited number of support staff will engage with this system, and they will operate in the existing office space in the shop that is currently used for bookkeeping, payroll, and scheduling.

IT Skills & Services

A part-time social media manager (presumably a communications major from the local university) will maintain blog content and engage customers and potential customers in conversations via social media networks.

Business / Managerial Resources

Maintenance and repair services will be contracted with an external vendor of ITM services. Initial training on the software system will be provided to the shop owner and a long-standing employee by a vendor recommended by the software developer.

V. How the Technology Solution will Improve the Process

The employee scheduling business process will be improved through the use of a software system primarily by enabling interactions between several elements of the software, and the provision of a user interface that makes those interactions appear seamless. The interaction of the software elements will yield a composition at a different level of abstraction. The interactions between the software elements include a potential schedule of employees that obtains their preferred days and times for working from emails and the employee profiles in the scheduling database. The user interface hides the component implementation, and yields a populated calendar reflecting employee schedules, with any potential conflicts indicated. Moreover, as a composition of software elements, the populated calendar updates as information changes -- prior to a specified cut off point of a time certain.

VI. Support for Strategy for Competitive Advantage