Feature Deep Dive – Notable Events

Next up in our Feature Deep Dive series is ‘Notable Events’. Here’s everything you need to know about this shiny new feature. 

In a nutshell… 

This feature allows you to record Notable Events for your business – ranging from global events like the Olympics, down to site specific scenarios such as a Taylor Swift concert (you could of course argue this is a *global* event). Here’s how it works… 

The event calendar 

All events across your organisation are displayed in the event calendar in a familiar, user-friendly calendar view. Operators of multi-site businesses can add events applicable to all sites, along with events that could be relevant to one or more sites, but not necessarily all.  

Examples of this could be bank holidays that your entire organisation needs to know about – or a weekly promotion that only runs in select bars. 

For each event you can record the following information: 

• Title of the event, along with a more detailed description. 
• The start and end date of the event – you can even record the time of day it begins and ends. 
• Whether it’s organisation or site specific 
• Category of event – for example if it’s a promotional period, a bank holiday or a sporting event. How this event might impact your business; positive, negative or neutral. 
• Absence restrictions – should managers be alerted when absences are requested during an event. 
• Time zone of the event – this is useful if you have an event happening at a specific time and place. For example, if you were to add the World Cup final as a Notable Event – you would add an event on the 18th of December 2022 starting 18:00 and set the time zone to Arabian standard time. This event would then appear on the rota at the relevant local time for the site – in this case 15:00 – allowing your site to have the information correct for them. 

Events on the rota 

All relevant events will also appear on Rotaready’s Rota Editor – where you have two options to display the information. As a row – similar to how shifts are displayed…

…Or if you prefer to save some space, you can choose to display them as an icon in day header, alongside the weather.

In both cases you can click to expand the event information and see more details. 

Both views allow you to add an event directly via the rota – however these events are restricted to the site of the rota you are on. This is the perfect place to capture events and scenarios specific to the person building the rota. You could capture things like local road closures effecting trade, or special promotions running that weekend. 

Permissions and visibility 

The fine-grained permission controls embedded within Notable Events means that you can give the right people, the right control when they need it. You can control who can add site-specific events, who can add organisation wide events and who can see events. This gives you the flexibility and power to empower people with the right amount of information. 

Notable Events also appear in cost control – giving you that extra bit of insight when managing your figures. 

Forecasting 

Another added benefit of Notable Events is that they feed directly into our machine learning forecasting models. If you have the forecasting feature enabled – we automatically include any Notable Events you may have added to help build our predictive models. Choosing the correct category and the impact it may have on your business will really help the forecasting model perform better – and be more tailored to your business. 

Let us know what you want to hear about next… 

That’s everything you need to know about Notable Events, if you have any questions, then please do get in touch with our team via the live chat on our website! And if there’s anything you’d like to hear about next, then let us know at comms@rotaready.com; otherwise, keep an eye out for the next Feature Deep Dive… coming very soon.