What is the staffing guide?

The Staffing Guide is a recommendation of how many labor hours to schedule each day for each department. 

• Once activated, it appears as green lines in the graphs of each Labor Cockpit.
• Users with Administrator rights can activate it via the tools icon in the Cockpit.

How is it calculated?

The Staffing Guide uses machine learning (ML) to calculate the number of productive hours needed per day based on:

• Forecasted activity
• Day of the week
• Seasonality
• Historical trends
• To ensure relevant trends, data from March 2020 to February 2022 is excluded from the model due to COVID-19 impact.

Important: The Staffing Guide does not rely on any manually set productivity, forecasted hours, or minimum/maximum staffing levels.

Instead, it calculates auto minimum and maximum hours based on historical activity patterns. These can be viewed via tooltips in the Labor Cockpit graphs.

When enabled, the system uses the configured FTE levels in PMI (if active in the cockpit settings) to suggest staffing in brackets of 0.5 FTE. It will never recommend fractional staffing like 10% of a day.

How is this Different from a Generic Productivity Formula?

Some users may assume that the suggested productivity (e.g., 1.99) is calculated using the standard formula:

Productivity = Workload ÷ Resource Hours

However, this is not how the Staffing Guide works.

•  The Staffing Guide does not use a static formula.
• Instead, it relies on a machine learning model trained on past performance data and trends.
• It produces hour-based suggestions, not productivity ratios — though you may back-calculate productivity based on the suggested hours if needed.

For true productivity forecasting, refer instead to the SMART Forecast, which uses either manually set targets or predicted hours based on your productivity forecast. 

What is its purpose?

The Staffing Guide serves two main purposes:

1.  To evaluate past staffing levels — helping you spot patterns of under- or over-staffing by day or activity.
2. To guide future staffing decisions — ensuring scheduled hours align with expected demand..

It’s also helpful for setting realistic productivity forecasts for future months. If you’re uncertain about what a suitable productivity forecast should be, the Staffing Guide provides a strong, data-driven starting point.