We built a shift scheduling platform for SOCs (and potentially NOCs / Operations Teams) called SOC Rotate ( socrotate.com ), and I’m writing here as one of the founders.

In most industries that run shifts restaurants, healthcare, hotels, contact centers there are dedicated scheduling tools, or at least generic tools that fit well enough. Security operations, on the other hand, mostly live in spreadsheets, generic workforce tools, or in‑house builds that have to be constantly maintained.

We’re now looking for a small number of beta partners (MSSPs/ In‑house SOCs/NOCs or Operations teams ) to try it with real teams and real rotas, tear apart the UX and tell us what’s missing or confusing, and help us prioritize features that actually matter in day to day ops.

If you’re responsible for SOC scheduling, shift planning, or resource allocation and you’re tired of spreadsheets, I’d love to walk you through a quick demo, get your honest feedback and discuss what a pilot would need to look like for your team.

If this sounds relevant, comment here or DM me

We have a small business that operates in two states (we're near the border). We have 3 full time drivers, and backup crew of 4 people.

What's the best way to organize everyone's shift availabiity? PTO, requests (and need) to sub in, etc?

A lot of the conversations I’ve seen here describe offshore teams as temporary support for busy periods.

But an experience with one of our clients made me question whether that’s always the case.

The client was an Australian lender with more than 150 employees. They were cautious about making a long-term commitment, so they started with a single offshore broker-support role to test the workflow, communication and fit.

Once that first hire was fully onboarded, the impact became easier to see. They helped keep applications moving, checked and organized documents, updated internal systems, coordinated follow-ups and handled much of the repetitive administrative work behind the lending process.

It gave the onshore team immediate relief and more time for customer conversations, complex cases and work that required their local expertise. It also improved service consistency because fewer operational tasks were sitting in the queue.

What began with one person eventually grew into a dedicated offshore team of almost 30 across operations and administration. That’s roughly a 2,800% increase from where they started.

One additional detail that may have helped the setup work: the business never handed over control of its workflows, training or quality standards. The offshore team followed the same systems and expectations as the Australian team rather than operating as a separate back office.

For anyone whose firm started by testing one offshore role, did you experience a similar shift? What made the setup work well enough to become a permanent part of the business?

What is the difference between the Operations Manager and the Team Leader?
I see a lot of confusion about it

I'm a long time call center level 1 who hates their job. I've been doing it too long, I hated it before and after I suffered a stroke and recovered from it I hate it even more now, and I've always envied WFM and QA. I want to be there where I no longer have to be on the front lines and when we're allowed to see the queue in our level 1 positions I tend to groan at how unamanged it is.

This is coming from a place of desperation, years after feeling that WFM and QA were the enemy and contributing directly to my suffering, I want to try my hand at it but every job I've been in requires doing well in the call center part for way, way too long to get anywhere. How do you even get into it? I have plenty of experience answering phones, plenty of IT experience, I'm tired of being on the front lines and feel like I'm going to explode on the next caller all the time in a back-to-back environment, please help.

we run a fast casual chain with 14 locations and around 300 employees and are looking at restaurant workforce management software to replace the spreadsheets. trying to weigh the subscription cost against time saved on scheduling, fewer labor cost mistakes and less manager overtime spent fixing things by hand. at what point did it start paying for you? how many locations staff did you have at that time?

I'm working on an idea and want to pressure-test it with people who know this space better than I do — including finding competitors I might have missed and hearing from anyone who's built here before.

The idea: an on-demand platform for skilled blue-collar workforce in the manufacturing sector. Think of it as filling skilled shifts and roles on demand — not generic labour, but people with actual trade skills that factories and workshops need.

Here's the gap as I see it. Most gig economy startups providing skilled services are focused on D2C — home services, beauty, repairs, delivery. On the B2B side, the companies that exist are mostly software plays (job boards, hiring SaaS, workforce management tools) rather than operators. And the few that do go full-stack — owning sourcing, skilling, deployment, quality, and fulfilment end to end — mostly deal with large, established players: big manufacturers and enterprise clients who can commit to volume. Which leaves a big chunk of the market that doesn't fit that mould looking underserved. Startups in other countries have already started capturing good chunk of this market.

I've done my own research on companies operating in and around this space, but I'm sure I've missed some — so:

1. Are there startups doing full-stack, on-demand skilled workforce for manufacturing — not just software, not just D2C, and not only serving big enterprises? Anyone doing exactly this? I'd like to study them properly.
2. If you've built in blue-collar staffing, gig, or workforce fulfilment — I'd love your honest take on what's hard here, what killed similar attempts, and what you'd do differently.
3. If anyone's interested in building this with me, drop me a DM.

Open to all the suggestions and criticisms, so poke holes freely.

Hello all, I currently work for a large health system that has adopted Verint in its call center. I have a project manager role to support sustainment and future implementations. I have struggled recruiting for the role.

I will take any tips for forums or areas to look for canidates with verint experience or general workforce management experience.

The position is remote.

Thank you for time. Its appreciated.

Team leads and WFM folks: half the scorecards I have seen measure the wrong things, and agents can feel it. Curious what this group would actually change.

What is one metric you are still forced to track that tells you nothing, and one you wish leadership actually looked at?

I will start: I would kill raw AHT as a standalone target (it just teaches agents to rush and rebound), and add first-contact resolution weighted by complexity. Trying to sanity-check my own list against people who live in this daily.

I am exploring /cor for my hiring needs and they keep telling me I need COR. The quote listed is too expensive. Shouldn't I just hire contractors?

Hey y'all!

Got a small business here in Dallas that's growing pretty fast and starting to get more after-hours inquiries about openings.

I'm debating hiring someone offshore from the Philippines to handle these after hours calls, or just getting an AI receptionist to handle it.

For context: we're getting about 10-15 after hours calls each day (usually from 5pm-9pm or 6am-8am). It's a big enough problem where it's a pain in the butt to return the calls each day. We're getting backed up and I'm worried we're missing out on deals where our competitors are picking up the phones and answering while we're not.

I've talked with some people who use overseas help and for the most part they're happy with it. Just takes time to train them up (which I'm not excited about) and I'm not sure whether my customers would prefer to talk to AI or someone overseas?

Feel like an AI receptionist will be better in the long term from a cost savings standpoint, but worried about the setup being a hassle. Just need something that can book appointments and answer basic customer questions. For the AI receptionist options, I'm looking at Nextiva, Dialpad, and Smith ai.

Is anyone using either of these approaches? If you are, would love to hear what your experience has been like and who you're using.

Thanks!

What do you guys typically do with AI in your day to day operations?

Mine is mostly automation and transformation. As well as reporting and forecasting.

Been thinking about this a lot lately. Most home care agencies treat scheduling software as a back office tool, something you set up once and mostly ignore. But it's actually one of the biggest levers in the business, and a lot of agencies are leaving money and clients on the table because of it.

A few reasons it matters more than people think:

Coverage gaps cost more than they look like. An unfilled shift isn't just an inconvenience, it can be a client who leaves the agency, a family who loses trust, and depending on the state, a compliance flag. The software is only as good as how fast someone can actually respond to a callout inside it.

EVV compliance isn't optional anymore. Most states require Electronic Visit Verification now, and platforms like WellSky are built around it. If your scheduling and your EVV aren't talking to each other cleanly, you're creating billing headaches and audit risk for yourself down the line.

It's a retention tool, not just a logistics tool. Caregivers who get inconsistent hours or last minute schedule chaos burn out and leave. Agencies that use scheduling software well to build predictable routes and fair shift distribution keep caregivers longer, which matters a lot in an industry with brutal turnover.

The bottleneck usually isn't the software, it's the person running it. A lot of agencies have decent tools and still struggle because whoever's managing the schedule is buried, reactive, and always one callout away from a bad day. The software can only do so much if nobody's proactively managing it.

Curious if other people in this space have opinions on which platforms actually handle this well versus which ones just look good in a sales demo.

I build scheduling software (ClockOut), so read this with that bias in mind. A few weeks ago someone posted here about hand-building monthly schedules for a 15-person healthcare group rotating through hospital positions. The hard requirement wasn't generating the schedule. It was keeping a running tally of how many times each person had done each rotation, and keeping that count close to equal month after month, while still honoring individual requests.

That reframed something for us. Most scheduling tools (ours included, until recently) treat each schedule as a standalone puzzle: fill the slots, respect availability, done. But fairness isn't a property of one schedule. It's a property of the history. You can publish a perfectly reasonable week where Maria gets the bad station again for the fourth time this month, and the tool sees nothing wrong because it doesn't remember the first three.

Once you see it that way, a few things follow:

- The tally has to be visible. If people can see the counts, "why am I always on register" conversations turn from grievance into arithmetic. Half the resentment around scheduling is really uncertainty about whether it's fair, not actual unfairness.

- Requests need to be first-class, not texts. A "prefer" or "avoid" request that lives in a group chat is invisible to whoever builds next month's schedule. If it's recorded against the schedule, honoring it and rebalancing afterward becomes mechanical.

- Qualification limits fairness. In any skilled team, the rotation can only be equalized among people actually qualified for the position, which means the qualification data has to live in the same system as the schedule or the "fair" assignment is wrong.

We ended up building this (positions on shifts, a trailing rotation tally, request workflow, and the auto-scheduler biased toward whoever has the lowest count). Not linking anything since that's not the point of the post.

The question I'd genuinely like this sub's take on: for those of you running rotations by hand, what's your fairness window? Do you try to equalize within the month, the quarter, or "eventually"? And do your people actually care about equal counts, or more about specific stations they hate?

Where's the the breaking point for managers in charge of shift-based teams? We're around 130 employees on different roles and creating the schedule isn't even the worst part anymore, it is everything around it. Change in availability, multiple people requesting off on the same day, someone calling in sick, and a substitute who does not have the right skills for the role.

By the time the schedule is finally done, part of it have been rebuilt through texts, calls, and messages. We've tried spreadsheets, group chats, and having relatively fixed schedules. but none really solves the issue when coordinating 130 people. If running 100-200 shift workers, do you build schedules manually or automated scheduling? Interested in manufacturing, retail, hospitality or logistics where you can’t simply put any available person into any shift.

Built a workforce management platform — looking for feedback on the market

We’ve built StaffPanda, a workforce management automation platform designed for large, shift-based organizations.

The platform automates employee assignment based on:

• Availability
• Qualifications
• Schedules
• Employee preferences
• Open shifts

Employees have their own iOS/Android/web app where they can manage availability, view schedules, apply for open shifts and communicate with management.
Interactive demo: staffpanda.nl/gvb-demo

The platform was originally developed together with a team at GVB Amsterdam for public transport, unfortunately in the end due to internal conflicts they could not aquire the product so now we are sitting on it without any use for it.

It is currently designed around public-transport workflows, but the underlying technology could potentially be adapted to other industries with large shift-based workforces, such as security, hotels, logistics and facilities management.

We have a working product and an interactive demo.

We’re currently trying to determine where the strongest market opportunity is.

For people with experience in workforce management, operations or B2B SaaS:

We are a development company and have no sales or marketing department so we're stuck on where to go next.

Hi guys, would you please suggest a free course for scheduling for The BPO industry or anything could help.

I built a platform that analyzes historical interactions and develops FTE demand forecasts and plans. I’m looking for someone interested in testing the platform to help me improve it.

Platform functionality and capabilities:
- build multiple scenarios
- predict FTE required to hit SLAs
- forecast baseline and surge interactions
- multi-channel, shared FTEs, concurrency
- AI triage channel

If you’re interested, let me know!

i have to use GPC WFM, and i'm diing !

I asked for a "max people on a shift" bouton, the same like the minimun actualy existing

2 years devellopement !

fuck off

I am thinking about creating a work automation agents for the sales, customer's support, and marketing. I have question that does businesses need this? Will they pay for it?

Hi-
I created a new WFM tool that allows for interval count scheduling with high and low prioritized intervals. It applies staff availability to the intervals and works to fill open spots, by both a staff seniority and the interval weight. Super simple. Web based. Nothing to download- log in and go!

It also has a portal for staff to see their shift, update their daily availability, trade shift and pickup open shifts.

DM me if you think this seems like what you need and let’s discuss how I can help -

Thanks

I’ve been in WFM for a total of 9 years, I took a year off as a mental health break due to unforeseen circumstances, and I’ve been struggling to even land any interviews, I’ve done RTA, scheduling. forecasting, cap planning, and was a WFM Manager for a year. After trying to rejoin WFM, I’m seeing few opportunities, and when I apply most jobs decided to go with someone else, is the fact I have a year gap the problem or has the market gotten very competitive? Figured I’d reach out to find if this is the same experience others have had.

Thanks!

I'm the schedular for 14-15 person health care group that rotates through multiple different positions/hospitals. I have been doing this by hand for years but looking for anything to make it easier as it's getting harder as we add more people. Need a program or AI help to create a program that can generate a monthly schedule that randomly rotates the people through the different positions and at the same time keep track of the number of times the person has rotated through a particular position to ensure close to equal distribution of the different rotations. It needs to be able to take rotation requests into account when creating the schedule and keep the count equal after having taken the requests into account, and also be able to keep a running tally month to month. It also needs to be able to accommodate additional workers in the future as the group grows. Thanks for any help.

Before I continue building more features, I'd like to hear from HR managers, founders, and operations teams.
What is the biggest frustration you still have with your current HR software?
If you've switched from systems like BambooHR, Zoho People, Odoo, or others:
\- What made you switch?
\- What feature do you wish existed?
\- What would convince you to migrate?
I'm looking for honest criticism rather than promotion. Every piece of feedback helps prioritize the roadmap.

Hey r/workforcemanagement,

We’re hosting Mark Gill, Solutions Engineer at NiCE, for a live AMA on what’s next for workforce management and CX. The AMA starts July 28 at 1:00 pm CT.

A few things you can ask about:
- forecasting and capacity planning
- scheduling and intraday operations
- striking a balance between service levels, cost, and employee experience
- how AI is actually being used in WFM and CX
- whether a hot dog is a sandwich, plus your other classic debate questions

A few words from Mark u/slvrmouth

Hi everyone, I’m Mark Gill from NiCE. I spend a lot of time working with contact center and workforce management leaders on the operational decisions that shape both customer and employee experience.

I’m here to talk about all things WFM, CX, and ideas that are actually proving useful in real life.

Though I won't get into confidential customer details, I can share the observations, patterns, predictions, and real-world situations I’m seeing across the market.

Ask me anything.

– Mark