Retendo Academic supports the entire institution’s workforce planning process. Employees, course coordinators, planners, finance administrators and the management are provided with role-specific views of the information they need.
The most important view for the employees is the work task plan, which sets out which courses they are scheduled for and the duties they have in each course. Employees can clearly see whether they are under- or over-allocated, whether their skills are being made use of and whether they are achieving satisfactory personal development in their work.
A clear summary of absences allows for efficient planning when the employee needs to be replaced.
Employees can keep watch to ensure that they are not over-allocated Each month that contains over-allocation is clearly shown with a red line.
Employees can view their duties in the course and when those duties must be carried out. This will serve as useful supporting data for their own detailed planning.
By clicking on a course, employees can see which other colleagues are involved in the same course. This leads to better coordination and distribution of work.
Employees also receive an overall summary of their post to ensure that it has the right balance as far as allocation is concerned and that there is a satisfactory distribution between different activities.
Employees’ working time is shown broken down into absence, allocated time and free capacity.
Employees receive a clear picture of their absences according to the type of absence.
Employees receive an overview of the distribution of their own working time between education, research, internal assignments and administration. Employees can thus ensure that their post is distributed as agreed.
In Retendo Academic, the course coordinator plans who will lecture, lead laboratory sessions, mark exams, etc. Time consumption and the time when the activities will take place are also planned.
The course coordinator him or herself chooses the level of detail the planning will be done at: e.g. for individual lectures or overall for all lectures.
The times when the various activities are intended to be carried out are displayed graphically for a clear overview.
The number of hours for which each employee is scheduled, for each activity.
When the planning is complete, the course coordinator can easily send the planning manager his or her request for staff resources to carry out the course.
The course coordinator’s staffing requests for the course are summarised in an overview of the course. The planning manager can then choose to approve or reject the requests.
Summary of the activities for which a person is scheduled. This provides a useful basis for the planning manager who is to approve or reject the requests.
The staffing requests which are issued, approved or rejected by the planning manager are displayed here.
A summary of budget, staffing, income, costs and results is displayed for each course. Whether the course covers its costs or whether the budget is exceeded is clearly displayed here.
A summary of key figures used as supporting data for budgets and planning.
The staffing is compared with the budget for the course to ensure that the budget is not exceeded.
The course’s estimated income and costs are compared and provide an answer to the question of whether the course covers its costs.
The staffing overview is an important tool for the planner and helps him or her to see which employees are under-or over-allocated and how much time is available for staffing.
The views can be filtered according to personnel category and allocation level, for example. Only employed staff with over 80% of full-time equivalent are displayed here.
This gives an initial indication of whether staff are over- or under-allocated. The planner can then further analyse the reasons for this via the work task plan and take appropriate action.
Here, the planner can see whether a person is requested by a course coordinator. The planner can then go to the work task plan to see details of what the requested hours will be used for and approve or reject the request there.
The employer’s responsibility for the work environment involves ensuring, among other things, that staff are not over-allocated and risk burnout. In this view, the planner receives a monthly overview of staff allocation levels and can take action as early as at the planning stage to ensure an even workload.
One challenge for planners is to obtain information on actual staff absences. Thanks to Retendo Academic’s integration with the university’s human resources systems, all actual absences are automatically transferred to the planner and are presented in a clear way. The planner can then adjust the work task plan to take into account the actual staff absences.
Thanks to a clear overview of staff absences such as holidays, illness and leave of absence, the planner can see how actual absence affects the person’s allocatable time.
The conversion feature enters all actual absences from the human resources systems into the work task plan.
If the actual absence imported from the human resources system differs from the planned absence shown in the table above, the planner can easily enter the actual absence into the work task plan.
All courses and projects are grouped into portfolios to obtain a satisfactory structure and monitoring per portfolio.
This ensures that courses and projects are not overstaffed in relation to the budget.
This provides a graphical overview of when courses and projects begin and end.
The view shows each person’s allocation to courses and projects. It is used, for example, to communicate allocation to the staff or as support for the planner in his or her staffing work.
This displays a distribution of a person’s entire allocation to courses and projects.
The number of hours needed to implement different educational courses is displayed here.
The entire summary can be exported to Microsoft Excel.
There is a hidden planning mode in Retendo Academic to enable the planner to complete the planning before the staff access it. When the planning is complete, the planner chooses to publish it for the staff. This prevents unnecessary questions and misunderstandings based on half-finished planning.
After planned work has been completed and the check has been carried out, the planner can lock the planning backwards in time to prevent unintended changes to the assignments.
The working methods for workforce planning can vary widely from one department to another within the institution. For that reason, Retendo Academic supports both central planning and planning delegated to course coordinators. In the case of delegated planning, detailed planning is carried out by the course coordinator, who then requests the desired staffing from the planning manager. This can be a very effective working method, particularly at larger institutions.
Experimenting with different scenarios is a powerful tool for producing more complete supporting data for decisions and in Retendo Academic it is easy to create and save your own scenarios for different periods.
The role of the planner is simplified thanks to the fact that Retendo Academic automatically calculates the employees’ continuous professional development time – a calculation that can be complicated in some situations. Administration time is also calculated automatically by the system.
In Retendo Academic, the planner always has access to up-to-date information for his or her planning thanks to integration with human resources, financial and course systems.
Retendo Academic enables a thorough analysis of how the department’s total income is distributed in terms of educational level, programmes and individual courses in order to ensure that the institution keeps within the financial framework. Income and costs are reported for each course and the courses that have a surplus or a deficit are clearly shown. The information provides good supporting data for decisions on financial positions.
The income and costs are added up for the entire programme, in this case nursing training.
Expected income is calculated for each course based on the number of students, points, throughput and so-called price tags.
Expenses based on staffing and staff salaries including various increments are also calculated for each course.
For the head of finances, it can be difficult to obtain supporting data for salary account-coding. Retendo Academic solves this by generating complete supporting data, account-coded and ready, based on staffing. Retendo Academic also handles all account-coding for staff on loan from or to other departments.
Retendo Academic provides the ability to register suppliers and consultants, including supplier invoices. When the consultants are allocated to different assignments, the system calculates an allocation cost per consultant based on the consultant’s hourly rate. When the higher education institution receives the supplier invoice for the consultant, it is registered and is easily checked against the staffing cost in the system.