Create several shifts for which your crews (new tab recently added to Shifts), and individual employees, will be associated. Ensure the shift rotation is such that you have adequate hours assigned to each day you would like to dispatch.
Shift/availability for the crew and/or individual employee will be calculated for the system date and sent to the Constraint Optimizer for consumption.
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All crews and individual employees that would be sent to the Constraint Optimizer based on an Optimized Scheduler Setup record, must all be assigned to a Shift for the system date or NONE can be assigned to a Shift for the system date (there cannot be some assigned to a Shift and some that are not assigned to a shift). If this condition is encountered, the process will fail, and an error will be displayed on the associated Optimized Scheduler Setup record.
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If the Constraint Optimizer can process a crew or individual employee that is not associated to a Shift for the system date (based on rules above), they will be treated as if they have a full 24 hours of availability. This means that a crew will get dispatched for the entire 24 hours. So, the dispatching results received will be heavily skewed and will not be very realistic. Therefore, customers are advised to implement shifts whenever using this integration.
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Crew Shift Start Date must always be >= system date for the shift to be used by the Constraint Optimizer. Also, if Shift Start Date is blank then this is treated as if there are a no crews or employees assigned to the shift and no availability can be calculated i.e. the Shift Start Date is necessary to determine the crew/employee available hours on the system date, whenever that may be. So, a starting point is needed.