Folks, please believe me when I tell you: E Schedule is really not the end of the world some seem to believe it is. Wal-Mart rolled this same thing out several years ago, even before I got into management myself, and I too thought it was going to be a fiasco. But it's really not.
Think of it this way. Your store is run by people who have needs just like you. It's but one of the reasons salaried managers have the options in the system to over ride the conflicts these automated schedules bring. It's really just a matter of communicating with them, in a non hysterical and 'hey, how can we make this work for everybody?' way, so that your days---and theirs----can resume running smoothly.
Retailers have exactly two corp. directed policies, and let no manager fool you on this: MAKE US MONEY. KEEP US OUT OF TROUBLE. That's it! The rest is left completely up to the individual salaried managers. i.e.: Any salaried manager can work with you on schedule conflicts. Again, just be diplomatic with them.
This will all work out, you'll see.....if you just stay calm and roll with it.
Given that I don't work for Kroger, I'll be the first to admit I don't know for a fact either. But from all the posts I've read on here about it, it sure sounds like the same animal to me.
As Dennis Miller says: "These are just my thoughts; I could be wrong."
Given that I don't work for Kroger, I'll be the first to admit I don't know for a fact either. But from all the posts I've read on here about it, it sure sounds like the same animal to me.
As Dennis Miller says: "These are just my thoughts; I could be wrong."
Eschedule has been good to me so far. I am actually getting 5 by 8 hour shifts instead of working 6 days to get 40 hours. If we ever get more people onto night crew, then my hours might be cut down to 28. We have me(a part timer), 2 full timers and 3 other part timers. We are going to need 5 more people at the pace the other 3 part timers work. My manager is leaning towards getting me 3 days off if my hours get knocked down to 28. Unfortunately, he has 0 control with E scheduling. It is left to the other manager that has no clue how to schedule night crew.
I got burned the other day tho. We need 4 people on Sunday nights to just barely get the work done. Eschedule gave us 3 people that night. Then, one decided to call in sick. I was stuck with one new person. What a mess. I worked OT with the managers permission and still had work left over when I left. No one from days was going to do it.
My masterplan is to get hired fulltime somwehere else. Then, let the store managers scramble to find someone or two to make up for the work I did. I realize Key Retailing is about the stores and labor force being standardized. But, human nature doesn't follow the course of a computer simulation. Yes, I can be replaced with a warm body, but my labor can never duplicated.
Given that I don't work for Kroger, I'll be the first to admit I don't know for a fact either. But from all the posts I've read on here about it, it sure sounds like the same animal to me.
As Dennis Miller says: "These are just my thoughts; I could be wrong."
I was trying to be funny with my "oooohhhh I don't know" like as if I am a teenager listening to sage advise from his mother. LOL
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I am no longer part of the oppressed, evil workforce of Kroger! Can you say "Hallelujah"
says in my contract that full time people are to be scheduled five days at 8 hours a day for 40 hours. when e-schedule started giving you 5 8 hour days you may already be full time. might be something to look into if you want to stay at kroger. so your hours dont get cut.
But, human nature doesn't follow the course of a computer simulation. Yes, I can be replaced with a warm body, but my labor can never duplicated.
Pretty much. My last dept head had a big issue because he didn't know his team and he let the computer do whatever foolishness it wanted. Management is supposed to review and tweak before it's finalized but whenever they do it seems to make matters worse.
The original post is flat wrong. We have taken eschedule issues to management. Issues of contract violation, scheduling that just made no sense like two eight hour shifts in a day. Management has been unresponsive and unsympathetic. We've been told it's too late to fix the same day the schedule's out, told it can't be fixed, accused of "abandoning our shift," told it's our problem to find our own replacements, etc., etc. Doesn't matter if it's a manager with dozens of years in retail experience or one fresh off the turnip truck. And the union WILL NOT HELP. We're told to give in or, if we refuse to be abused and have your contract rights violated, we'll be written up for insubordination and have to fight that battle. More drama. More stress. There is no upside. None.
eschedule depends on district getting elms right. for all their experience, data mining, deep dives and mathematical models, ours have been massively off since the refresh. I wouldn't be surprised if our experience is not unique. to me this was obvious weeks ago and yet they're still not adding hours. sorry but we can't absorb hundreds more customers a day and make green half hours or offer 'faster checkout" and that receipt tracker isn't going to pull osat to 80 when lines are 5 deep.
Given that I don't work for Kroger, I'll be the first to admit I don't know for a fact either. But from all the posts I've read on here about it, it sure sounds like the same animal to me.
As Dennis Miller says: "These are just my thoughts; I could be wrong."
I was trying to be funny with my "oooohhhh I don't know" like as if I am a teenager listening to sage advise from his mother. LOL
Yea, I got it....Laughed my ass off imagining you wringing your hands and rolling your eyes! I have a guy in dairy who does exactly that, lol~~~
Depending on the store you're at, E-Schedule may or may not work out. At my store, we're going on week two of E-Schedule and a lot of people are upset over their hours, shifts put out by the computer make even less sense now than before and our co-managers are on conference calls with corporate almost daily because of the less than satisfactory Que-Vision scores and overabundance of dips. It's a problem that we've been vocal about, but we have a store manager that listens and he's personally working to override peoples' hours and shifts in the computer to make things like they were before this mess. Bottom line is, if your store has management that's reasonable and cares, communicate your concerns and issues because the scheduling software isn't as rigid as some have said.
Corporate is making it harder and harder for store managers to run stores efficiently, but store managers do still have quite a bit of control over what happens within their stores. If you're lucky enough to have one that's interested in working with the employees and at least tries to maintain a somewhat positive work environment, go to him or her and see if something can be done.
-- Edited by GenesisOne on Thursday 24th of October 2013 11:17:56 PM
Agreed. The e-schedule keeps putting people at times/hours that are not for the benefit of the store or the employees. So that line of bull some people here are saying is wrong. I mean, heck, we had a bunch of people come in for third shifts to do days work with customer service. This is not at a 24 hour store, so it made no sense whatsoever. Not to mention it ignores contract rules and what not.
The problem is kroger took this from Wally World and they don't have a union so they just thought it could work for kroger. No it can't because e sked doesn't know your contract there's no way to put it in besides seniority. Just another thing kroger tries to do like wal mart
Anonymous wrote:Agreed. The e-schedule keeps putting people at times/hours that are not for the benefit of the store or the employees. So that line of bull some people here are saying is wrong. I mean, heck, we had a bunch of people come in for third shifts to do days work with customer service. This is not at a 24 hour store, so it made no sense whatsoever. Not to mention it ignores contract rules and what not.
If tasks are being scheduled at incorrect times, it can be fixed relatively easily. Every dept has task start/stop times that are set up in elms and esched. If these times are not correct for an individual store, all you have to do is let your div labor mgr know. For pete's sake, the job aids walk you through the whole process of getting that fixed.
Anonymous wrote:
No it can't because e sked doesn't know your contract there's no way to put it in besides seniority. Just another thing kroger tries to do like wal mart
It does actually know all the contractual rules that pertain to scheduling. It knows overtime rules, short rest rules, seniority rules; all that info is in there. I've seen it.
Anonymous wrote:Agreed. The e-schedule keeps putting people at times/hours that are not for the benefit of the store or the employees. So that line of bull some people here are saying is wrong. I mean, heck, we had a bunch of people come in for third shifts to do days work with customer service. This is not at a 24 hour store, so it made no sense whatsoever. Not to mention it ignores contract rules and what not.
If tasks are being scheduled at incorrect times, it can be fixed relatively easily. Every dept has task start/stop times that are set up in elms and esched. If these times are not correct for an individual store, all you have to do is let your div labor mgr know. For pete's sake, the job aids walk you through the whole process of getting that fixed.
Anonymous wrote:
No it can't because e sked doesn't know your contract there's no way to put it in besides seniority. Just another thing kroger tries to do like wal mart
It does actually know all the contractual rules that pertain to scheduling. It knows overtime rules, short rest rules, seniority rules; all that info is in there. I've seen it.
You're actually making a point AGAINST e-schedule. It'll have contract rules in there, ignore em. It'll have times that are best to schedule people based on elms and what not, ignore that too.
Anonymous wrote:It'll have contract rules in there, ignore em. It'll have times that are best to schedule people based on elms and what not, ignore that too.
Let me open your eyes to a very important piece of information. Eschedule does not ignore any of those rules. It will schedule workers 0 hours before it will violate availability, contract, or labor rules. If people in your dept are being scheduled incorrectly by seniority, it is because they have not been set up with primary and secondary labors the way they should; they are being scheduled by seniority but only within their primary labors. Anything else that appears outside the rules is being done by your schedule writer who has to manually override anything that violates seniority, labor laws, contract rules, OT limits, etc.
Anonymous wrote:It'll have contract rules in there, ignore em. It'll have times that are best to schedule people based on elms and what not, ignore that too.
Eschedule does not ignore any of those rules.
Anything else that appears outside the rules is being done by your schedule writer who has to manually override anything that violates seniority, labor laws, contract rules, OT limits, etc.
You're contradicting yourself.
Besides, writers canu only override so much before being penalized. Wake up and realize the workers are being screwed! Get your head out of the sand.
I think a lot of schedule writers use e-schedule as a scape goat. If someone complains about their schedule "Oh it was e-sched! Not me!" Whatever. That's a bunch of BS. It's not the end of the world, and schedule writers need to not keep blaming it. Blame the company, blame themselves. They can change the schedule and they DO NOT GET PENALIZED for it!
As a front end schedule writer, I can tell you that eschedule will NOT give what you are used to help wise, but it will NOT necessarily be wrong either. All of those union negotiated parameters are in there, but it is up to your schedule writer to pay attention to any alerts they get when violating those parameters (and not to just override them). Front end has already been using something similar to this, so other departments are going to have the most heartache with this. What I have seen other departments do, which will be a huge mistake if your managers allow your department heads to do this, is continue to write a schedule manually, put the whole thing into eschedule manually, save it, get ten alerts for parameters they have violated, and override them all (thus rendering built in parameters worthless).
If your department heads don't understand how this works, they are going to have a hard time with it and your customers will suffer for it. It's best to use the system they way it was intended and to get used to the new way your schedules are created. Believe me, everyone will be impacted in some way.
Anonymous wrote:It'll have contract rules in there, ignore em. It'll have times that are best to schedule people based on elms and what not, ignore that too.
Eschedule does not ignore any of those rules.
Anything else that appears outside the rules is being done by your schedule writer who has to manually override anything that violates seniority, labor laws, contract rules, OT limits, etc.
You're contradicting yourself.
Besides, writers canu only override so much before being penalized. Wake up and realize the workers are being screwed! Get your head out of the sand.
How am I contradicting myself? Nothing I said contradicted anything else I said. Not a thing.
Besides being scheduled for too few hours because of potential conflicts, everything is done properly according to availabilities and the way labors are assigned to individual workers. If you have PT workers only available mornings scheduled in front of FT workers with open availability, blame mgmt for accepting that availability.
I would suggest you recognize that the system only writes the schedule the best way it is told it can be written. You're the one taking the "it's eschedule's fault, not mine" line without question because it's easier to blame a computer than blame your dept head. I can tell by your opinions you're not a schedule writer, so you should probably listen to those of us who are and who have an actual working knowledge of the system.
For those of you that have actual, hands on experience with E-Schedule, I would like to ask a few questions. The first question I have is, can E-Schedule pretty much "do" anything that Sked was able to do? For example, on Sundays, using Sked, our CSM would schedule three supervisors for the front end throughout the day due to our store being one of the highest volume stores in the district. Now that E-Schedule is here, we're back to two supervisors on a Sunday, and it's hurting quite a bit, but our CSM says that the software won't allow a third supervisor shift on a Sunday. Is that true?
Also, I feel really bad for some of my co-workers. They are down to like one or two days a week with E-Schedule when with Sked, they were getting four or five days a week. Our CSM says E-Schedule will limit the number of hours you get based on availability, so the more closed your availability is, the less hours you're likely to get. Thing is, one person can't open his availability any more because he's still in high school and another works at another job during the day. They use to get more days and hours though with the same availability when Sked was being used. They, along with others that I have talked to, are looking to find another job and quit and I hate to see this happen because I like working with them. Now, I may lose four or five co-workers that I really like working with because they are being told essentially that nothing can be done. I have urged our store's Cultural Council to get involved, and I talked to the head of Cultural Council, and she's definitely concerned and wants to move fast to try and help those struggling with their hours out, but I don't know how much success her efforts will yield. Even though E-Schedule is not impacting me in a negative way and although I'm still getting well over thirty hours just as I was with Sked, I hate seeing what's happening to others and I want to try and help Cultural Council, but I'm worried nothing can be done.
our CSM says that the software won't allow a third supervisor shift on a Sunday. Is that true?
No. They're either misinformed or lying through their teeth. We do it here easily.
Thanks for the answer. I don't know the real reason then why it's no longer being done. Our co-managers are on conference calls almost daily now because of how E-Schedule is being implemented. It was bad before, but now, it's almost an every day call from the front end coordinator or someone higher up wanting to know what's the problem. I don't know if the people at the store I'm at just don't know what they're doing when it comes to E-Schedule or if it's all a big show put on to make it look like the software is at fault when in reality corporate doesn't actually care about dips and Que-Vision compliance and all they really want is to have us cut back on hours. The front end shifts are quite strange now and seem to all be about trimming hours off of shifts like floor supervisor shifts, service center shifts, self-scan shifts, utility shifts and so on. Eight hour shifts are a lot less common now.
I've noticed the shorter shifts now. We've had a lot of issues but ~90% can be traced back to old or improperly updated availabilities, old requests for days off not put in the system, etc. Other than that, though, it's done a decent job scheduling. Last week was the highest green half hours % we've had in months. We almost made 90% lol.
I've noticed the shorter shifts now. We've had a lot of issues but ~90% can be traced back to old or improperly updated availabilities, old requests for days off not put in the system, etc. Other than that, though, it's done a decent job scheduling. Last week was the highest green half hours % we've had in months. We almost made 90% lol.
It's made scheduling so much easier. It follows seniority just fine. We just gotta make sure we teach the system to work so that it'll work for us. All these idiots complaining about eschedule really tick me off. All these old timers just don't like change. Simple as that. That anon is an idiot. As for us we actually passed green half hours the first week of escheduling :)
nicobug2 wrote:As for us we actually passed green half hours the first week of escheduling :)
We didn't get 90% (haven't in the 7 months I've been here) but we got the closest so far last week which was our first week scheduled by the new system as well. We had alot of bumps especially concerning availability issues, requested days off, and minor but fixable seniority issues, but the majority of the schedule it wrote was pretty much spot-on. The traffic pattern at my store is extremely sporadic, so it's hard to run the floor and stay at 1+1 but it was definitely better than it had been, considering we're a $1.15+ mil per week store.
our CSM says that the software won't allow a third supervisor shift on a Sunday. Is that true?
No. They're either misinformed or lying through their teeth. We do it here easily.
In the front end with sked, we only had to follow headcounts provided with cashier and bagger schedules. With eschedule, we have headcounts for all jobs in the front end (previously you just had to make sure you were within your total number of hours for FES, SCO, and office schedules). If your CSM is trying to follow that headcount as closely as possible, like I do, then he or she will schedule the one less supervisor.
I've noticed the shorter shifts now. We've had a lot of issues but ~90% can be traced back to old or improperly updated availabilities, old requests for days off not put in the system, etc. Other than that, though, it's done a decent job scheduling. Last week was the highest green half hours % we've had in months. We almost made 90% lol.
GHH is probably in another topic here, but since it was brought up, there is no way that something wasn't adjusted in the QueVision system that caused us all to struggle throughout the summer and dip without understanding why, and now suddenly almost the entire enterprise is hitting it.
I usually trust the Kroger systems to know what they are doing, even eschedule and elms, but I'm going to claim that there is/was some sort of conspiracy at work here.
The union is only as strong as its members and there are many employees that are scared to stand up. Where is everyone at when they hold quarterly meetings? If there is rights being violated they do not know unless you tell them. United we stand and divided we fall, e schedule is another ploy for corporate to take advantage of workers.
The one thing E schedule cannot do is account for workers who have seniority but do not come to work. We have a cashier with seniority who requests to work 7 to 3 Mon. thru Fri. as her seniority allows but she only comes to work enough to maintain her seniority. Since Christmas eve she has only worked 2 days. She goes to a doctor who has been written up in the newspaper as running a hydrocodone clinic. (I previously worked in the Pharmacy for years and saw quite a few examples of this doctors script writing habits. Whatever the patient wants they get) The dr. always writes her a note to be off work so she calls in constantly. The E schedule assumes she is going to be there. So... we are always short a cashier , never mind if someone is really ill and can't come in. Someone is called in early everyday and that messes up the entire days schedule. So much for the E schedule...
The one thing E schedule cannot do is account for workers who have seniority but do not come to work. We have a cashier with seniority who requests to work 7 to 3 Mon. thru Fri. as her seniority allows but she only comes to work enough to maintain her seniority. Since Christmas eve she has only worked 2 days. She goes to a doctor who has been written up in the newspaper as running a hydrocodone clinic. (I previously worked in the Pharmacy for years and saw quite a few examples of this doctors script writing habits. Whatever the patient wants they get) The dr. always writes her a note to be off work so she calls in constantly. The E schedule assumes she is going to be there. So... we are always short a cashier , never mind if someone is really ill and can't come in. Someone is called in early everyday and that messes up the entire days schedule. So much for the E schedule...
She just needs to be taken off the schedule. She can just write her time in on whatever days she decides to show up and BAM! your dept has 40 more hours to use
