Broadcast open shifts

When you publish an open shift, Planning can email everyone who could take it. This page is for administrators, who turn it on, and for planners, who use it. Employees who receive the email read Take an open shift or the Portal guide.

Turn it on#

1. Open Planning → Configuration → Settings (you need the Settings administrator right).
2. In the Notifications block, tick Broadcast open shifts.
3. Set At most n people per shift (20 at first) and n emails per person per day (5 at first).
4. Save.

The limits protect people from too many emails.

What happens#

1. A planner publishes an open shift that was a draft. This works from any publish action: the shift, the schedule's Publish button, a selection or Publish and Send.
2. For each open shift that has not ended yet, Planning finds the candidates. A candidate is a person (never a material) with an employee record who:
   • holds the shift's role (any person if the shift has no role);
   • has no other shift at that time;
   • is working for the whole allocated time of the shift, after time off and public holidays;
   • passes the bridge checks, when installed: no time off, the required skills, inside their contract.
3. It skips people who already received the day's limit of broadcasts, and people with no email address (work email, or the user's email if there is none).
4. It emails up to the per-shift limit, in the order of the resource list (by name). Each email is recorded, so the daily limit can be counted. Records are deleted after 30 days.

The email is titled "Open shift available: day, time". It says "An open shift you are qualified for is available. The first person to accept it gets it.", lists the times and role, and has the button Take this shift:

• for a person with a SmartERP login, it opens the shift in the application, where they press Assign to Me;
• for a person without a login, it opens a public page where they press Take this shift; see the Portal guide.

The first person to accept gets the shift. Everyone else who opens the link sees "Already taken: someone accepted this shift first."

What does not trigger a broadcast#

• An open shift that is already published when you press Publish again (for example one that an employee gave back): no new email is sent.
• Open shifts created directly in the published state.
• Open shifts that end before now.

Check that it works#

Create an open shift with a role held by a test employee who has a work email address, publish it, and check that the employee receives the email. If it does not arrive, look at the outgoing emails under Settings → Technical → Email → Emails (developer mode).

Next#

• Assign open shifts with Auto Plan
• Send shift reminders