See 7 Reasons Scheduling is Holding Your Employees and Company Back

Is your business awash with white boards, shared excel spreadsheets, sticky notes and calendars? If you’re still doing things manually (the hard way!) in 2019, then it's almost certainly costing your business in terms of time, money and effort.

This month, we take a look at why traditional scheduling and calendar software simply isn’t fit for purpose any more, and how you can fix it quickly and easily.

1. It's messy and disorganised

Traditional business scheduling systems generally rely on some combination of:

• Whiteboards
• Spreadsheets
• Notes
• Shared calendars
• Group emails
• Calendar software

Whenever there are multiple systems in play, accuracy takes a hit. Mistakes will be made, records will be lost and over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of visits, meetings, holidays, room bookings and more. By having multiple systems it's difficult to share common resources and keep track of their availability and usage across departments, projects, or just their daily workload.

If you have more than a few dedicated scheduling tools you should consider reducing your list and switching to a single, unified solution as it will improve organisation and cut mistakes immediately – saving you money.

2. It takes a lot of effort

Maintaining multiple records across different platforms is time consuming – you’ll need someone (or a couple of people) to manage the scheduling process. There's a lot of manual effort, which diverts your business resources away from its core purpose.

Duplicating bookings in different systems, keeping them all up to date and trying to keep everybody informed, takes time and a lot of effort.

Using a streamlined scheduling software system will cut down the overall effort associated with scheduling – freeing up time and resources.

3. Control is limited to a few people

To keep control of their scheduling, many organisations limit access to staff scheduling tools to a few responsible gatekeepers – the only people in the business with the power to add, remove and edit scheduling information.

This makes the process inflexible and unwieldy and it can be difficult for other employees to react when changes happen. The right scheduling software will provide shared access, so that everyone in your organisation has the visibility and control they need.

4. Sharing information is difficult

With manual scheduling and multiple systems, it can be hard to share information and changes across your organisation. Big group emails, sticky notes on desktops and shared calendars are no match for a centralised scheduling system, where all team members can see real-time information relating to all the resources, whenever they want to and wherever they are.

The right scheduling solution gives the ability to notify team members of changes automatically – improving efficiency and reducing confusion. You won’t have to worry about missing a visit or turning up to a meeting that's been cancelled ever again!

5. Crunching the numbers is a pain

More and more organisations are utilising business intelligence and AI. Having relevant, accurate and up to date data about all their people, equipment and other business resources, helps them gain a better picture of wha'’s going on in their organisation, and what they can do to make it better.

With manual scheduling – creating any meaningful report can be difficult. Someone has to record, analyse and bring together the numbers, and it’s difficult to compare figures over time from different systems.

Centralised, cloud-based scheduling systems make reporting simple. In-built reporting tools will provide detailed, accurate and fully customisable reports, that can be quickly and easily generated by anyone, and stored in the system for long term comparison.

6. Everyone is used to different systems

In the vast majority of organisations, you’re going to have people using multiple different software packages, operating systems, email platforms and ways of working.

In manual scheduling systems, getting everyone to talk to each other and share information is a pain – for things to work, the gatekeepers either have to tailor information to suit a wide range of systems, or force everyone into the same systems and ways of working. Either way, someone has to compromise!

A high quality scheduling system will integrate and share information across multiple different platforms, bringing everything together without forcing everyone to work in a fix way.

7. Technology provides a much better solution!

Ultimately, manual scheduling is more expensive and time consuming, whilst being less accurate, and less flexible.

Modern scheduling software brings everything together in one place, improving efficiency, productivity and profitability.


So what are you waiting for? Remove the chaos from your scheduling today and get started with Schedule It today!

Last updated, 25 May 2017, 12:57