The Client: Inclusions East
Inclusions East is a not-for-profit organization that supports persons with intellectual or dual disabilities, to ensure an enhanced quality of life, and inclusion in all aspects of community living.
The Challenge
Inclusion East’s approximately 65 staff members are located across 20 sites and work various shift schedules, which change over time. Management was recording and tracking shift data manually (in spreadsheets, and paper forms), resulting in inefficiencies and opportunities for error. As the organization grew – in staff, and infrastructure – tracking this data became increasingly difficult. They needed a web-accessible solution that simplified the reporting process, reduced errors, and provided opportunities to build new functionality over time.
The Solution:
The Silverstripe based tool we built serves two primary audiences:
(a.) the workers who can input their shift hours, leave requests, incident reports, and other employment data and;
(b.) administrators and supervisors who can approve time and leave requests, and ultimately process payroll based on this data. It gives them a better overview of the organization’s time-logging activities, with various automations in place, and allows them to easily make adjustments to data in real-time (for example, editing a time log on behalf of a staff who made an error).
Key technical functionality:
A few notable items achieved in this project:
- Mobile friendly, clean/simple design
- Lots of complex math behind the scenes (for example: calculating into the future to see if a staff would have enough vacation time earned by their requested leave date)
- Automation (for example, cron jobs that reset banked time-in-lieu at fiscal year-end, or a rule that puts staff on a cooldown timer if they use all their sick time)
- Custom user permissions (for example, Supervisors can only see staff data for their assigned divisions)
- Reporting (namely: location and payperiod reports for logged shifts)
- Detailed logging (for example: staff shifts, changes to their banked time, what admin approved a leave request, etc.)
