In Dayforce, zones are used to organize a location for labor planning, scheduling, and security access. Zones are an area in a location that uses part of the labor budget and has employees scheduled to work in it. A common example of a zone is an area in a store that sells similar products, like the Home Theater zone in an electronics store. However, a zone doesn't need to generate sales or transactions. A stock room in a clothing store is a zone because employees are scheduled to work in it and those labor hours are budgeted for, but the zone doesn't directly generate sales. Similarly, organizations in the manufacturing industry wouldn't consider sales when deciding what areas of a plant need to be zones. They might have a zone for each line in the plant.
Although you need to configure a zone for each staffed area in your location, each location doesn’t need to have a zone. Zones might only describe certain locations in your organization. For example, in a hotel chain, the Lounge zone needs to be configured to plan, schedule, and track the performance of the bar and lounge in the company's high-end hotels. Because the bar and lounge area are only present in high-end hotels, the Lounge zone is only assigned to certain locations.
Assigning appropriate zones helps users manage their locations. A manager of a hotel without a lounge wouldn't want it as a department on the hotel's schedule or see it in the labor budget in Plan, as the hotel won't use any of its labor budget staffing an area it doesn’t have.
You can organize your locations into as many zones as needed. For example, a specialty audio retail store that tracks sales between headphones, mini-systems, speakers, and receivers would need at least four zones configured in Dayforce. The store could also have zones for customer service, receiving, or any other staffed area.
All zones configuration, from creating zones and zones packages to linking them to merchandising departments, is completed in the Zones Configuration feature.
When deciding how many zones locations require, keep a few items in mind:
- Zones and departments might be configured with a one-to-one ratio.
- A single zone can contain multiple departments. This allows for the management of a larger employee base than just a single department per zone.
- Zones are the lowest or most granular unit used in Dayforce for planning, forecasting, and scheduling.
The general process flow for configuring zones in Dayforce consists of the following: