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Ask DC Metrics customers what they can already do with rostering, and the answer is straightforward. They can build a roster, move people around it with real flexibility and generate a new one whenever they need to.
What they can’t do yet is plan one ahead of time. That’s about to change.
“Our rostering is pretty much straightforward. You can put people in a roster with flexibility, and you can generate rosters randomly on a daily basis. But the missing piece is planning. We’ve got the data to do this, so that’s our next piece,” says Aniket Pramanik, the application programmer behind DC Metrics at WIN Solutions.
Where Rostering Sits Today
DC Metrics already talks to the payroll and workforce systems its customers run day to day. Integration with Deputy, Dayforce and Elmo are live feeding hours, leave and overtime straight through so nobody’s re-keying data between systems.
What’s missing is the planning layer that sits on top of all that. Today, a supervisor can put a roster together and shuffle people around it, but DC Metrics can’t yet tell them who the best people are for a given shift, or what the roster should look like a few weeks out based on what’s actually happened in the DC before. Closing that gap is the current focus for Pramanik’s team.
Turning Performance Data Into a Planning Tool
The building block for smarter rostering is what the team calls the productivity and availability matrix. DC Metrics already knows how productive each person is, task by task. It also has a good read on reliability, who tends to be rostered and doesn’t show, and who’s consistently available for the shifts they’re given, and where availability patterns make a shift a poor fit.
“It gives you the confidence that if you roster someone, they’re actually going to turn up for that shift,” Pramanik explains, “instead of finding out they’re usually on leave whenever you roster them.”
Modelling the Roster Before You Commit to It
The next layer is demand planning. Supervisors can feed in expected volumes for a period, or let DC Metrics draw on historical data.
Think of a Black Friday peak. Most operations have a rough sense of what that period looks like based on previous years, even before the current season’s numbers start coming in.
From there, the system runs those numbers against the availability matrix. “We generate a large number of scenarios and take you to the best one,” Pramanik says. “This is the scenario where you’ll achieve, say, a target rate of 100 units an hour.”
This is decision support, built on a business’s own operational data. Planners still choose the final roster, but from a shortlist of strong options, rather than a blank calendar.
Proven in the Field, Not Just on the Whiteboard
The thinking behind rostering isn’t theoretical. WIN Solutions has already built and delivered rostering integration for a major powertool manufacturer, sharing rosters directly into Elmo.
“It’s a very different ERP, a different warehouse management system,” Pramanik says. “They’re sending us picks, they’re sending us put-away. It’s a lot easier for them, but it was really tough for us. We did it though, and we’re pretty happy. It’s at a stable stage now.”
Built on the Harder Market First
Some of the most useful lessons came from an unexpected direction, building payroll logic for a US customer. Australian Fair Work legislation is genuinely complex to model, with rules that shift depending on hours and circumstance.
“The American system is pretty straightforward,” Pramanik says. “It’s more rule-based, and every state has its own legislation.”
Having built the Australian logic first, the US version came together with far less friction. As Pramanik puts it, “it wasn’t that tough compared to Australian standards.”
What’s Coming
Rostering is the next major piece of DC Metrics, and it’s actively in development. “It’s a complete new thing,” Pramanik says of the build.
WIN Solutions isn’t putting a date on it here. What can be said is that it builds directly on the productivity and reliability data DC Metrics already captures, and on integration work already proven out with real customers.
For operations still building rosters on gut feel and a spreadsheet, or juggling a scheduling tool that has no idea how people actually perform on the floor, this is the direction DC Metrics is heading. More detail will follow as it gets closer to release.
Want to know how DC Metrics could fit into your operation? Talk to the WIN Solutions team.
