Generating a Weekly Schedule

Instead of building a week by hand, you can have VoiceERP generate it for you. From the Scheduling page, open the week you want to plan and start a generation — you'll land on the "Plan the week" screen, where you review everything the generator will work from before kicking it off.

The plan screen lays out the week's inputs from top to bottom. Route demand for each day comes from the Cortex forecast and is shown in a chart so you can sanity-check the numbers. If a day looks off, use the "Adjust demand" button in that day's header to raise or lower the expected routes by shift type. You can also add custom demand rows (a service type, wave time, and per-day route counts) for volume you know is coming that the forecast doesn't show yet.

"Time off this week" lists every synced time-off block, and you can add a manual block for a driver (with a date range and an optional note) so the generator knows not to schedule them.

The driver availability matrix is the heart of the page: one row per schedulable driver, one column per day. Each cell shows the driver's standing weekly preference — preferred day, avoided day, a day they don't work, or time off. Click a cell to cycle a one-week override: available, then guaranteed (the generator must give them a shift that day), then unavailable, then back to no override. Drivers with no scheduling preferences set are flagged and included with default availability — you can set their preferences under Scheduling → Configuration.

The "Generation options" section controls how the week is built. Demand source: schedule against the Cortex forecast, or against custom demand only. Fill methodology: auto-fill shifts from available drivers, or leave them as open slots to assign later. Week-over-week consistency: maintain consistent schedules (reuse patterns that worked in prior weeks) or build a fresh schedule every time. Placeholder mode: generate placeholder shifts (generic "you work this day" shifts, with real times assigned closer to the day) or real shifts. The defaults for all of these come from Configuration → Manager preferences, so you usually only touch them for a one-off week.

Press "Generate schedule" and the run starts in the background — you'll see a progress view with staged updates and an elapsed timer, and you can cancel mid-run. Typical runs finish in a couple of minutes. When it completes you get a "Schedule generated — take a look" notification and land on the schedule page to review, edit, and publish the result. Nothing is sent to drivers until you publish.

If you rerun generation for the same week, the plan screen reopens with the inputs from the previous run, so you can tweak one thing and go again.

The route forecast usually reaches about two weeks out. For a week beyond that, the page offers to generate from the most recent available forecast instead — clearly labeled as an estimate — or you can switch to custom demand, which needs no forecast at all. If there's no forecast anywhere to fall back on and no custom demand, the week can't be generated yet.

All dates and days on this screen follow your company's timezone, not your browser's.