A case study of the scheduling of a team of 200-plus security staff at a London landmark.
With five million visitors viewing one of the greatest collections of European paintings in the world, across the equivalent of four full size football pitches, scheduling of the National Gallery’s 200-plus security team is essential.
The National Gallery‘s Security Duty Manager Duncan Hales has introduced VSS Pro from The Business Software Centre. Described by the company as an alternative to the traditional and laborious paper-based method of recording staff rotas, VSS Pro means, according to the makers, that Duncan can now centralise, manage and view this critical information at his PC.
The National Gallery’s 200-plus security staff members are divided into six teams, part-time and full-time. The Gallery’s collection is precious and vast, with works by Van Gogh, da Vinci, Botticelli and hundreds of others on show across public and private areas. For years, the National Gallery’s security team has managed the task of staff scheduling by manually entering rota information into a book; which has become increasingly impractical given the size of the team, the Gallery itself, and the increased focus on security in recent years.
Duncan Hales says: “I spent hours each day collating rotas from each team so we would have one cohesive set of information ready the next day. Using a book was very limiting and everything took so much more time than it needed to. Growing increasingly frustrated, I researched alternatives that would allow me to do the same job in half the time via a PC. As a technical novice, I didn’t want anything that would take days to learn how to use, so I chose VSS Pro and we haven’t been disappointed. It does exactly as it says on the box, allowing us to build sick days and annual leave into our rotas, as well as track where staff members are and where they have been. I can pull off a report in seconds if I need to without even having to think about it. Having less paperwork is a blessing and allows me to get on with the job in hand.”
Features include: the product can track time off; it allows time and cost modelling; produces daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly schedules for a department, shift or location; and encourages better planning with scope to plan up to 3 years in advance. The product is compatible with Windows 95/98/2000/NT/XP or higher.
