It's Monday morning and someone is missing from the shift
A support worker's child has a fever, and in ten minutes you have to cover a shift at a service on the other side of the province, find out who's free, change the sheet, tell the coordinator, and remember at the end of the month that that particular day came out different from the plan
Then the month ends and the second job starts, the one nobody sees, the attendance to pull together, the reports to prepare for the authorities, each with its own form and its own deadline
The hours that go in the office
Anyone who works in administration in a cooperative knows it, the work isn't hard, there's just a lot of it, and it's always the same
- Shifts across several services and several sites, with last-minute cover that has to be written down everywhere
- Attendance that arrives on signed sheets, in messages, in a file somebody fills in their own way
- The same hours retyped into the staff management software, then typed again into the report
- Reports to the authorities, and every authority wants its own format, with its own totals and its own columns
- Staff documents with their own expiry dates, and if you let them run you notice too late
What really grates is that the hour reaches nobody, the shift is there for the people at the service, the report is only there for a form
Examples of what the system can do
These are examples of jobs the system is able to do, not jobs already delivered to some cooperative, Muffin Suite started recently and we'd rather say so
- It gathers the attendance from sheets, files and messages, puts it into a single format, and loads it into the staff management software you already use
- It compares the shift as planned with the shift as worked, and lines the differences up for you, without straightening them out on its own
- It prepares the report in the format that particular authority asks for, taking the figures from the hours already in the system
- It checks the totals before the file goes out, if a service's hours don't match the month's it stops and tells you
- It keeps the diary of the staff documents, and warns you beforehand, not the day after
When the program has no technical integration to use, the system works on the screens the way an operator would, and for us that's the ordinary part of the job, not the exception, and the same goes for the portals of the authorities you deal with, where you are the one logging in with your own credentials
What stays with the people
The decisions stay where they are now, who covers a shift is the coordinator's call, because they know who can work that service and who can't, the system does the round of the sheets and the fields, it doesn't choose the people
When a value doesn't add up the system doesn't fix it, it stops, sets the case aside and waits for you, and you can decide how much autonomy to give it, at the start it's worth keeping it on a short rein, then you widen it on the steps you have seen work
Why the cooperative comes out ahead
The hours that go into data entry today come back, and in a cooperative those hours have somewhere natural to go, the services and the people who use them
You don't have to replace your software, the system uses what you already have, like a person sitting at the screen, and I tell you the monthly fee before we start, so there's no large upfront cost to get past the board, and if you want an idea of what those hours weigh there's the sum to do here
How we start
I'm Antonio Fuccillo, I write the automations myself and I answer the messages myself, so you're talking to the person who does the work, you show me a procedure, a short screen recording is fine, I look at whether it can be done and I tell you the fee before we begin, then you approve every addition yourself, and you'll find it explained in how it works