Childcare Centre Rostering
We developed an optimisation engine that automatically generates optimal rosters that meet compliance and improve or maintain quality of care.
Challenge
A national childcare service provider had traditionally created rosters in
a decentralised manner, where each centre had agency to produce rosters as they saw fit. This approach created significant variance in roster quality with respect to compliance, labour cost, quality of care and agreeability for staff.
Given the variance in outcomes across centres, the service provider believed that better roster planning could improve all metrics across the organisation, and that an innovative approach was required to achieve this.
The provider engaged us to understand whether a bespoke roster optimisation engine could deliver operational benefits.
Utilizing mathematical optimisation and the Biarri Workbench platform, we delivered a bespoke roster optimisation engine for childcare staff planning.
The engine considers a wide range of hard and soft constraints and automatically generates minimum-cost and NFQ-compliant rosters (including room/roof ratio, minimum diploma, etc) together with relief and break scheduling that prioritise continuity of care.
Analysis of Biarri rosters against baseline operations at 20 centres found:
- Up to 16% reduction in labour cost, through more efficient use of staff in the labour pool.
- Mitigated risks of essential compliance breaches (lead educator assignment, award rules, room/roof ratios, etc)
- 14-50% improvement of soft constraint KPIs, including improving closes-to-open, alternating early-late, and minimising room changes.