Scheduling Tool

[TayRob16]

Hey there! 

Honestly - this probably isn't the best place to post this, but it is the community that I trust the most so I'm going with it. 

I am having issues finding a good solution to build a scheduling tool on. This year, I used excel. In my not-so-humble opinion, it's perfect. I pull in data on fabric, clean it, manipulate it, and shoot it into a lakehouse and then into 47 different spreadsheets, it updates daily, yada yada. 

I am a Data Scientist for a restaurant franchisee and the whole purpose of this is to give suggested hours daily and weekly to managers and for them to be able to enter their schedule. It also updates daily with what was worked the day before, etc. 

The number one complaint that I am getting from managers is that it is difficult for them to enter their schedules on their phones. I have installed teams, given them direct access, etc. to their store's schedules on their POS, but they want to be able to do it on their phones. Okay, cool, how? I know they can do it on their phones now, but, to be honest, they really struggle with excel even on a computer. 

Any suggestions? Apps? Stick with excel but a different format? I am starting next year's and I just really want to help them out if possible.

Thank you! 

Photo attached of the current scheduling tool in excel.  

[v-sgandrathi]

Hi @TayRob16,

Just looping back one last time to check if everything's good on your end. Let me know if you need any final support happy to assist if anything’s still open.

Thank you.

[v-sgandrathi]

Hi @TayRob16,

Thank you @svenchio and @lbendlin for your response to the query.

Just wanted to follow up and confirm that everything has been going well on this. Please let me know if there’s anything from our end.
Please feel free to reach out Microsoft fabric community forum.

[svenchio · Accepted solution]

Hi @TayRob16  ... what about using Microsoft Teams Shifts  👉  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-is-shifts-f8efe6e4-ddb3-4d23-b81b-bb812296b821 

If your org is already heavy on Teams, look at Shifts in Microsoft Teams, it is literally built for frontline worker scheduling to create schedules, assign shifts, requests, etc.

There’s a very usable mobile app (Shifts inside Teams mobile) and you can import/export schedules and timesheets via Excel, so you can still feed your Fabric pipeline and reporting. 

Pros:

#1. No need to develop a Power App from scratch– Shifts already has one, optimized for phones.

#2. Managers get all the “nice” stuff: swap requests, time off, notifications.

#3. Still nicely integrated with Excel and the broader Microsoft stack.

But of course you will ned to  map your current “47 spreadsheets” logic into Shifts’ model (teams, groups, locations), but in my mind is ORDERS OF MAGNITUD BETTER than develop a power app from scratch. 

Think about it, hope this helps ... kudos if you find my suggestion useful! I'd appreciate, for other fabric & automation topics, check on my blog https://www.techtacofriday.com/ cheers and best of lucks! 

[TayRob16]

Unfortunately, only our managers have access to Teams. We don't have all of the employees on the platform. We don't need to use this tool for requests and things like that. 

I have looked into Shifts, but as far as I could tell I needed to have the names of the employees actually on our Teams platform to be able to use them. I also didn't see any spot to add how many hours managers were allowed to schedule that day, but I might have missed that. 

Thank you for your answer!

[lbendlin]

Have a look into PowerApps.  Those are usually working well enough on phones if you don't try to do too much.

As you probably know Power BI is a reporting tool, not a resource management tool.  Don't even think of implementing this in Power BI.