LabRoster
A secure and intelligent workforce planning tool for diagnostic laboratories.
Stop wasting hours on lab scheduling. Set up your laboratory data once to generate draft rosters in minutes. Simply input your staffing levels, competencies, shift patterns, and bench coverage to automate your scheduling forever.
How it works
Six steps, start to finish.
- Download a workbook
- Add your workforce and requirements
- Upload the workbook
- Generate a draft roster
- Review the issues raised
- Export to Excel
1 · Get a workbook
The blank workbook has the headings, guidance and dropdown lists but no staff. Both examples are complete fictional departments you can generate a roster from straight away.
- Balanced example — a well-staffed department. Shows what LabRoster produces when a workforce comfortably covers its requirements.
- Challenging example — deliberately contains staffing, competency, leave and availability constraints so you can see how LabRoster identifies problems. It is not typical.
2 · Build your draft roster
Excel workbook (.xlsx). Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
Advanced settings
Leave the dates blank to use the period set in your workbook. The generation ID is recorded with each draft so the same roster can be reproduced; you do not normally need to change it. Use Generate alternative roster instead.
Roster summary
This is a draft for you to review. LabRoster supports your decisions about staffing; it does not make them.
The staff rota is a simplified workbook for circulating to the team: who is working, when, and in which section. It deliberately leaves out competency records, individual hours, fairness analysis, workforce vulnerabilities and the reason for anybody's absence. The manager report keeps the full analysis.
Issues
Grouped by how much attention each one needs. Related warnings with the same underlying cause are combined into one item.
Roster preview
Scroll sideways to see the whole period. Filter to focus on one shift, section or person.
Section coverage
Who was allocated to each laboratory section. One person covers one section at a time, so this reflects who is actually there.
Contracted hours
Target hours are contracted weekly hours scaled to the length of the roster period.
Workforce resilience
How many people could cover each discipline if somebody were unavailable. This is about the department as a whole, which is a different question from whether one shift is thinly covered.