For some, scheduling seems like a dark art, practiced by mysterious beings in shadowy corners of the company’s head offices. Whereas others may assume schedulers are merely observers, as algorithms and A.I. make all the decisions for them, somewhere in the misty reaches of ‘the cloud’. But which is it? What do schedulers actually do? Why do they do it? And what actually is a scheduler’s job?
Well, schedulers have a key role within any bus company and what they do has far reaching effects across all departments. It may not seem it at first, but a simple mistake by the scheduler can cause real problems out on the road. Problems that will not be immediately (if ever) identified as a scheduling issue. For this reason it is imperative that you have the knowledge of what your scheduler should be doing.
So, let’s look at the basics.
1) ‘A scheduler has to compile the most cost effective and operable set of timetables, driver duties and rosters possible’.
We should all be able to agree with that statement. Creating efficient duties is good but operable duties are what you really want. You could strive to ensure your duties only pay the bare minimum for the work being covered and weed out any pay for unproductive time, but that is no good if you lose all the flexibility within the schedule. Is it really that efficient to reduce your pay by 15mins on paper, only to actually pay 2 or 3 hours overtime on top?
2) ‘A scheduler needs to feed a mulitutude of downstream systems with data’.
The most basic example of this is informing duty allocators of the duties that have been planned. However, in a fast moving world where data is king, it is usually the schedulers who are having to provide data in various formats to more and more downstream systems. These include ticket machines, real time information providers, websites & mobile apps, to name just a few. Also, the recent Buses Services Act requires more data from every operator to be uploaded to the Bus Open Data Service, much of which is created and/or administered by the scheduler.
3) ‘A scheduler controls all the major cost centres within a company’.
This may sound controversial but it is unavoidably true. The scheduler will dictate the number of duties a set of timetables requires, therefore how many rota lines there are and how many holiday weeks you need, how many CPC days, etc. etc. If you have a scheduler who consistently schedules more duties than required, then there are big knock-ons to that; more drivers, more pension payments, more uniform, etc.
Less obvious (perhaps) is that the scheduler will also dictate the number of buses your company has. The implications of this are simple, more buses in use means more engineers required, more spare parts need ordering, more spare vehicles are needed and more land is required to house them all on. It is also important to note how the vehicles are being deployed. Utilising unsuitable vehicles on certain routes or journeys has the real potential of increasing the amount of work your engineers have to do and the number of vehicles required to meet run out each morning.
So these 3 basic points outline what schedulers do, day-to-day, across the UK bus industry. However, none of these points explain what the scheduler’s job actually is.
So what is a scheduler’s job..?
Well, put simply, a scheduler’s job is to keep everyone happy..!
I know this is quite an abstract concept and you may think ‘what is this guy on about’, but when it boils down to it the scheduler has the responsibility of keeping the whole business ticking over and that surely works better when everyone is happy
A good set of schedules has the potential of keeping all of these people happy
- The Drivers
- The Allocators
- The Engineers
- The Customers
- The Local Authorities
- The Traffic Commissioner
- The Company Shareholders
The skill of the scheduler is successfully balancing the different needs and wants of every stakeholder invested in the company. Too often schedulers can be pressured into only satisfying one group of people, which ultimately fails.
A good example of this would be keeping just the shareholders happy by reducing paid time and vehicle layover time. This will no doubt decrease costs, which should increase profitability; on paper at least. However, it can also decrease reliability, leading to journeys being missed or leaving late, which then turns customers away from the service and ultimately leads to the shareholders being unhappy as revenue falls.
There is, however, one person in the business that the scheduler often doesn’t keep happy and that is of course the scheduler. The responsibility for keeping the scheduler happy falls on those managing the company who must recognise the enormity of what they are trying to achieve and give them the support required to do it.
We can support schedulers simply by giving them the tools they need to do the job. This may include computer aids, which can speed up the process of producing schedules. But it’s not just good software or hardware that’s required; sometimes what is really needed is some help. If you have multiple depots with multiple changes each year then why put all that pressure on the one person to sort it out?
Schedulers should also be involved in decisions that directly affect schedules. It’s obvious, but if you head into a branding meeting and decide it would be lovely to have this route as a standalone unit, you really should ask the scheduler if this will work. Also when a depot manager agrees with their drivers that breaks must be longer at a certain point, ask the scheduler first what the implications of this will be.
We should also invest in our schedulers. Drivers, engineers, managers and accountants, all get training before they start work, and they also get refreshers to stay up to date, so why wouldn’t schedulers?
Keeping everyone happy is a difficult job that requires experience and training to master, so schedulers should be given the time and opportunity to learn their trade. You wouldn’t let a school leaver with no accountancy experience do your year-end accounts would you? So why would you do it for scheduling?
(Find out more about the training services available)
So there we have it, schedulers have possibly the hardest job of all; keeping everyone happy. It is up to us as an industry to recognise how difficult this job is and give it the credit it deserves. We should also support those who are in the role by giving schedulers the tools they need and the freedom to learn their trade; after all, if we keep the schedulers happy, then they should keep everyone else happy.
Kieran Proctor 