Autofill is an automated scheduling function that you can use to generate schedules. When you autofill your location’s schedule, Dayforce attempts to create a schedule that respects employees’ schedule compliance policies. Additionally, it uses your organization’s assignment policy to help determine the priority of different groups of people (for example, that full-time employees should get priority for shifts compared to part-time employees). You wouldn’t normally use autofill only once during your process. Instead, you can run autofill at any point, over and over, during the scheduling process.
Before You Begin: You can run autofill only in Schedules. Centralized Schedules doesn’t support autofill.
The autofill function isn’t intended to create a perfect schedule. A number of factors can increase the complexity of generating a schedule (for example, the number of zones in your location, different labor demand curves, and employee availability). You should always verify your schedule after it’s autofilled.
Note: The assignment policy is already configured in Dayforce to match your organization’s policies and business practices. You can contact your system administrator for more information on how Dayforce assigns employees to generated schedules.
An autofilled schedule doesn’t necessarily represent the ideal schedule for your location. Instead, you can use the autofill function to improve your productivity when scheduling.
You can use autofill in many different ways, including:
- As a starting point: Instead of building a schedule from scratch, you can run autofill first. Dayforce creates an autofilled schedule to match the labor demand for your location. With a large portion of the scheduling complete, you can then make modifications as necessary.
- To improve existing schedules: You can copy last week’s schedule to the current week, if you expect you’ll need similar coverage, and then run autofill to make minor modifications and improvements.
- To fill in schedule gaps: You can run autofill after you create the key shifts or scheduled minimum staffing levels throughout the week. For example, you can schedule specific job assignments that you know must be filled, and then run autofill. You can run autofill without modifying existing scheduled shifts. This way, it fills only the gaps in your schedule, but doesn’t modify the shifts that you scheduled.
Autofill Phases
When autofill runs, it goes through the following distinct phases to schedule employees:
- Construction
- Enforce minimums
- Improvement
| Phase | Description |
|---|---|
| Construction | In the construction phase, the autofill algorithm generates a number of shifts that will roughly cover the labor demand as best as possible according to the filters and options that you selected. This phase ends when no more shifts can be added that provide a net benefit to coverage. For example, it won’t place a shift that provides an extra hour of coverage if it will also create four hours of overstaffing because the tradeoff isn’t worth it. Think of this phase as demand-driven shift creation. |
| Enforce Minimums | In the enforce minimums phase, the autofill algorithm attempts to extend shifts or add more shifts to meet employees’ minimum weekly hours. These extra hours are generally in excess of what is needed to cover the labor demand from the construction phase. Normally, if an employee was needed to cover workload, autofill would have already scheduled the employee in the construction phase. Think of this phase as employee-driven shift creation. |
| Improvement | In the improvement phase, Dayforce modifies the shifts that autofill generated in the first two phases to better match the labor demands. This can include shrinking shifts or extending them, swapping activities, and more. The goal is to end up with a schedule where no single action done to any shift would result in a net improvement to coverage. Note that things such as base coverage aren’t factored into schedule efficiency, so it’s not a matter of making the schedule efficiency as high as possible. All types of coverage are considered. |
Autofill Settings
The Autofill dialog box in Schedules contains a number of settings that you can use to control how Dayforce autofills your schedule. The dialog box has two tabs: Filters and Options. You can use the Filters tab to limit what Dayforce autofills.
The Options tab contains sub-tabs that you can use to configure the autofill process. The following tables, divided by sub-tab, describe these settings.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Unfilled Schedules Only | Generate unfilled shifts (that is, shifts are scheduled to match staffing requirements, but no employees are scheduled to the shifts). You can assign employees to unfilled shifts as you finalize the schedule. |
| Modify Existing Shifts | Modify existing shifts to generate the schedule. Clear the checkbox and Dayforce doesn’t modify existing shifts when autofill runs. If you select this option, Dayforce can modify any shift, not just the shifts within the selected filters. Additionally, if a shift isn’t compliant, autofill doesn’t necessarily correct the shift. It assumes that the existing shift is acceptable. |
| Autofill Schedules Work to Start/End/Change |
Specify the shifts that autofill generates:
This option can help speed up schedule generation, especially in cases where the labor demand mostly changes only on the half or whole hour, or you don’t want employees starting or ending at non-typical times. |
| Skip Scheduling Tasks | Don’t include scheduled tasks when generating shifts. |
| Allow Shifts To End On 8th Day | Generate shifts that end on the last day of the week (the 7th day) and end within the first day of the next week (the 8th day). The employees’ schedule rule policy determines the end time of the shifts that autofill creates. Autofill won’t create a shift that ends later than 11:45 PM on the 8th day. Organizations with non-standard business day alignments (for example, 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM) can use this setting to ensure that autofill creates shifts for their schedules. |
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Skip construction phase | Skip the construction phase of the autofill process. |
| Skip base coverage checking | Don’t check for base coverage when filling the schedule. |
| Skip one step look-ahead for minimum staffing coverage | Don’t check for minimum staffing coverage when filling the schedule. |
| Activities cover the whole shift | Ensure that activities cover entire shifts. |
| Prefer primary job assignment filtering |
Prioritize employees by primary job assignment when assigning them to unfilled shifts. It schedules employees first if their primary job assignment matches the job that is required for the shift. Note: To see this setting, you must enable the Prefer primary job assignment filtering client property. |
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Skip enforce daily minimums phase | Don’t enforce daily minimums when generating schedules. Daily minimums are defined in schedule compliance rules and dictate the minimum amount of time that employees must be scheduled each day. |
| Skip enforce weekly minimums phase |
Don’t enforce weekly minimums when generating schedules. Weekly minimums are defined in schedule compliance rules and dictate the minimum amount of time employees must be scheduled each week. Typically, autofill should enforce these minimums so that it schedules employees enough hours in the week. However, if your organization doesn’t enforce daily or weekly minimums, or you plan on modifying the schedule later so that employees are scheduled to the proper duration, you can skip this phase. |
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Skip schedule improvement phase | Don’t make improvements to the generated schedule. Generally, when you skip this phase, autofill completes faster. |
| Skip shrink shift improvement | Don’t make improvements to the schedule by shrinking shifts. |
| Skip extend shift improvement | Don’t make schedule improvements by extending shifts. |
| Skip change activity improvement | Don’t make schedule improvements by modifying activities. |
| Skip move shift improvement | Don’t make schedule improvements by moving shifts. |
| Skip move break and shrink shift improvement | Don’t make schedule improvements by moving breaks and shrinking shifts. |
| Skip move break and extend shift improvement | Don’t make schedule improvements by moving breaks and extending shifts. |
| Skip move break and move shift improvement |
Don’t make schedule improvements by moving breaks and shifts. Note: Skip move shift improvement, Skip move break and extend shift improvement, and Skip move break and move shift improvement manipulate two shifts at the same time. When enabled, autofill moves the meals/breaks in one shift while shrinking/extending/moving a different shift. This is done because, in some cases, Dayforce can’t improve coverage by modifying a single shift. |
| Skip append activity improvement | Dayforce automatically enables these options because they should be skipped unless they’re used for configuration purposes. When enabled, these options attempt to cover a shift entirely with activities, which can have undesirable side effects outside of configuration scenarios. |
| Skip removal of non-covering activities |
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| No Restriction | All employees are eligible for scheduling, including those that don’t primarily work at this location. This is the default selection. |
| Primary Location | Employees are restricted to being scheduled to their primary location but can be scheduled to any on-site department and any job assignment. |
| Primary Job Assignment | Employees are restricted to their primary location, primary on-site department, and primary job assignment. This is the most restrictive option. |