During the planning process, Dayforce uses service patterns to distribute planned labor throughout the day. A service pattern defines a location’s relative staffing needs in quarter-hour increments, using a simplified forecasting method based on historical data. You configure service patterns in Plan Setup > Service Patterns.
Role feature access: Plan Setup > Plan Setup > Service Patterns
For example, if a location is open only from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM, and has 300 hours of labor planned for that day, the location’s service pattern defines when the 300 hours should be scheduled. The location also has a simplified service pattern, stating that double the amount of employees should be scheduled from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM. Taken together, the 300 hours of planned labor and the service pattern, Dayforce calculates the location’s staffing requirements as 100 hours from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM, which is 50 scheduled employees, and 200 hours from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM, which is 100 employees. This is just a simplified example. Typical service patterns define relative staffing levels at each quarter hour and the changes from one segment to the next are incremental.
These incremental changes create a service pattern with a curve. The height of any one quarter-hour segment on the service pattern’s curve, relative to the other segments, defines how many more employees should be scheduled during that time. In the following screenshot, the location is the busiest close to the halfway point of the day:
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