Case study · 24/7 operations

The monthly shift roster: from three days to under an hour.

A 30-person, round-the-clock operations team was hand-building its roster in Excel every month, balancing leave, rotation rules, and minimum staffing by eye.

2 to 3 days → under 1 hr
to produce the monthly roster
30
people scheduled across 24/7 shifts
Zero
staffing gaps slipping through unflagged
Days
from scoping to working tool
Client
24/7 network operations team
What we built
Shift schedule builder
Handles
Leave, rotations, minimum staffing
Output
Formatted Excel roster, ready to publish
Status
In production, managed
The problem

Three days a month, lost to a spreadsheet.

Every month, someone sat down with Excel and built the L1/L2 roster by hand: who's on leave, who rotates where, whether every shift meets minimum staffing. It took two to three days per cycle.

Manual scheduling doesn't just cost time. It hides mistakes. A shift quietly falling below minimum cover is exactly the kind of error a tired human misses and a rule engine can't.

What we built

Constraints in, publishable roster out.

A browser tool that does the balancing and produces the exact spreadsheet the team already works from.

Rules, not judgement calls

Leave, rotation patterns, and minimum-staffing requirements are configured once and enforced on every roster, every month.

The whole team in one pass

Feed in the team list and constraints; the roster for all 30 people generates in one run instead of three days of juggling.

Excel out, formatted

Exports a ready to publish spreadsheet with frozen panes and a familiar layout, so the tool fits the team's process instead of replacing it.

Problems highlighted, not hidden

Any shift below minimum staffing is flagged in the output before the roster ships, not discovered mid-month.

The outcome

An hour of review instead of days of assembly.

Before

  • 2 to 3 days of manual Excel work per monthly cycle
  • Rules balanced by memory and cross-checking
  • Below-minimum shifts found only when someone noticed
  • Roster quality depended on one person's spare attention

After

  • Roster generated and reviewed in under an hour
  • Leave, rotation, and staffing rules enforced automatically
  • Every gap highlighted before the roster is published
  • Scheduling knowledge lives in configuration, not one person's head
Running in production

Going live was day one. It's been looked after every day since.

Teams change: people join, rotation rules evolve, staffing minimums move. Because we manage the tool, those changes are configuration updates we handle, not a reason the tool stops being used.

StatusIn production
MonitoringWatched around the clock
Maintained byThe team that built it

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