Defining and Working with Non-Working Time

Working and Non-Working Time

One of the concepts of 24Planning is that you can define working and non-working time.

If resources are people, non-working time could be:

Time outside of normal working hours, e.g. 5pm - 09.00am in case working time are defined as 09.00am-5.00pm.
Bank holidays.
Time off for individual persons.

In case resources are machines or equipment, non working time can be:

Periodic planned maintenance for a machine.
Unplanned maintenance for a machine, e.g. due to a breakdown.

In case, resources are meeting rooms, non working time be:

Reserved time slots, when rooms are unavailable for booking.

Scheduling Events overlapping with Non-Working Time

Irrespective of how working and non-working time are defined, 24Planning has been set up in such a way that events CANNOT be planned during non-working time for a particular resource.

The exact behaviour of 24Planning depends on the parameters set on the Event Object in the Datasource definition. More specifically, if the duration mode is set to:

End Date: You cannot schedule any events that overlap with non-working time for that resource.
Duration: In this case, your event will automatically be extended for the duration of the non-working time. Let’s clarify by means of an example: assume you have a 3 hour event and it starts at 4pm on Tue. Let’s assume the workday ends at 5pm and commences again on Wednesday at 9am. Then the event will be displayed as starting on 4pm on Tue and ending at 11am on Wednesday, i.e. 24Planning automatically recomputes the event duration such that the work can be spread across multiple days, with non-working time in between.

Configuring Non-Working Time in 24Planning

The are two ways to define working and non-working time:

Via work Schedules and work schedule lines.
Via Resource Availability on the datasource.

Below we explain the use cases that fit either of these, based on the employee planning example mentioned above.

Work Schedules are mostly used for, surprise, defining work schedules, e.g. Monday to Friday 09am - 05pm. In case you operate in shifts, each shift can have its own workschedule.

You assign a Work Schedule to a resource via the Work Schedule Reference on the Datasource configuration page. So in order for this to work, the resource record must have a field where the Workschedule for that resource is defined. Every resource can have one and only one work schedule.

In some cases, you may already store employee absences in a separate object, and it would be quite cumbersome to copy this over to a workschedule, especially since absences are pretty dynamic by nature. Here resource planning comes to the rescue. It allows you to use your existing object to define resource availability and unavailability.

You can combine Work Schedules and Resource Planning, e.g. for defining the default workschedule as well as individual absences. try it out