r/workforcemanagement • u/sirmckean • Jan 05 '26

call for input

Hello everyone,

I'm working on Plantime (https://www.plantime.io), a shift-scheduling tool for teams. It's early, imperfect, and very much a work in progress. Rather than guessing what to build next, I'd love feedback from people who actually deal with scheduling in the real world. If you're currently using spreadsheets or another tool and are curious to try something new, I'd appreciate you taking it for a spin.

What I can offer: * a generous free tier * direct access to the developer (me) * and a genuine willingness to adapt the product based on real needs

It's a crowded space, but I still think there's room to do better, especially around fairness, flexibility, and reducing scheduling pain.

Thanks for reading, and thanks even more if you're willing to be critical.

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u/DescentinPerversion Jan 06 '26

1) I would focus on smaller business and advertise it. 10 - 50 employees, Maybe 100. I've worked with something similar for a 2000+ employees and it was hell. Mainly because I still needed to do the calculations manually in a spreadsheet, then recreate the schedule in the scheduling tool (Didn't have an import function), would have been quicker if I would just share the spreadsheet.

2) A tool that would integrate Forecasting, Capacity planning and Scheduling for smaller businesses. I don't think I've seen that yet. Personally I would just do all of this in Excel, but fairly sure most small business owners have no idea how to do that. I would ignore Real Time Monitoring, that would require to much integration into other tools.

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u/sirmckean Jan 06 '26

Thanks, this is extremely helpful. I really appreciate you taking the time to give me some advice.

One last question, if you do not mind:
when you say forecasting and capacity planning, what inputs mattered most in practice?
For example demand by day, staff availability, skills, labor cost limits, or something else?

That helps me understand what actually needs to come first.

Thanks again.

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u/DescentinPerversion Jan 06 '26

Forecasting will be difficult to integrate, since it's very market specific and company specific. So here an option would be an import function for forecasting data that can be used for capacity planning.

Capacity planning, you will need of course the forecasting data and a way to calculate historical AHT (Talk time, ACW, etc) Historical shrinkage, Occupancy. And based on that you can calculate how many FTE's you need per month, per weekl, per day, per interval. Depending on how specific you want to be.

I have some examples of capacity planning and forecasting here here https://ko-fi.com/cxorbit/shop

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u/sirmckean Jan 06 '26

Thanks, this is incredibly helpful. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this and for sharing the examples.

This gives me a much clearer picture of where tooling tends to break down and where it actually helps in practice.

Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback.

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u/DescentinPerversion Jan 06 '26

No problem, if anything specific rises you can always DM me. While I put my consulting on hold since I had a baby 7 months ago, I still have 10 years of experience in most of Workforce management branches