Workforce management (WFM) is software that forecasts how busy each shop, ward, warehouse or factory will be, and then builds the shift schedule and the wage budget to match. It also records the hours each person actually worked. It keeps every schedule within the working hours that labour law allows. It is used wherever people work in shifts: in retail chains, hospitals, warehouses, restaurants and contact centres.
It works in four steps. First, it forecasts demand. For a shop, demand means the number of customers or bills in each hour. The forecast is based on past sales, the day of the week, festivals and the weather. The page on demand forecasting explains the method. Second, it converts demand into the number of staff needed for each hour. Third, it builds the roster. It assigns named people to shifts, and checks each person's skills, availability, weekly off and leave. Fourth, it compares the cost of the roster with the wage budget.
The labour law check matters. Indian shops are covered by state laws that limit working hours, often to about 9 hours a day and 48 hours a week. Factories are covered by a national law, the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code. It sets a limit of 8 hours a day and 48 hours a week. These laws also require a weekly day off and a rest break, and extra pay for overtime. A roster that breaks these rules can lead to fines.
Say a supermarket chain in Kerala has 40 stores. Onam, the state's biggest festival, is two weeks away. The WFM software reads each store's hourly bills from the point of sale (POS) software. For one store in Thiruvananthapuram, it forecasts 1,400 bills on the Saturday before Onam, compared with 600 on a normal Saturday. Between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., it expects 300 bills an hour. One cashier can handle about 30 bills an hour, so the store needs 10 billing counters open then. The software builds a roster with two extra shifts. It finds that two employees would cross 48 hours that week. So it gives those shifts to part-time staff instead. The store manager checks the roster and publishes it to every employee's phone.
Each employee then marks attendance at the start and end of each shift, often on a fingerprint reader or a phone app. The software sends the hours worked, including overtime, to the HRIS and payroll system.
Contact centres use a specialised version, part of workforce engagement management. Hospitals often schedule nurses inside a hospital operations platform. American trucking firms use an electronic logging device, which records driving hours, because the law there limits them.