This small business owner handles a variable staff schedule for over 100 relief pharmacists, working at pharmacies all over Canada.
About the Business
Company M, a pharmaceutical relief agent, works with about 100 pharmacists who are sent as relief pharmacists to work in pharmacies all over Canada. Company M’s clients include large chain stores, such as Loblaws, Wal-Mart, Shoppers Drug Mart, and Rexall, as well as small independent pharmacies.
The Challenge
Here’s what Company M needed to accomplish:
We were looking for something to be easy to share between everyone involved in the schedule: the pharmacists, the manager and the administrator. We are working all over Canada and need an accessible way to plan and communicate. We have used many software solutions before, but they didn’t work. There were lots of problems, and they were not easy to use.
Previous software and calendar solutions were not easy to use and lacked the right features. With Teamup, however, they were able to set up a perfect way to manage their ever-changing staff schedule and keep their clients happy.
The Solution
We heard about Teamup and when we tried it, we loved it.
The team set up four separate master calendars; they use one each for three of their major clients, and one calendar for their smaller clients. On each master calendar, they have a sub-calendar for each store location. When they get a request for a pharmacist, they create an event with the assigned pharmacist’s name and put it on the sub-calendar for that location.
Teamup is easy to use and easy to share. We like being able to have all our customers already set up in the sub-calendar; so we do not have to add their address or information every time they need to be on the schedule. We do lots of updates to our schedule, and we found that it is easy to update in Teamup Calendar. The manager is always traveling, and he can use it anywhere to notify the pharmacists and administrator of upcoming shifts.
They are able to quickly add and update the staff schedule, for a large roster of clients, without having to search for information, or re-enter it into the calendar every time.
We like the repeat feature in the calendar, as we are sending our pharmacists very often to trips for two or more weeks, sometimes for the whole month. Before, we had to write each day separately. It took a long time, of course, to fill out the sheet. But with Teamup it is much easier to do: just one click and that’s it.
The Success Factors
These factors really made Teamup work well for Company M:
- Easy to Update: Teamup is accessible everywhere at any time. With Teamup’s mobile apps and access via any browser, the manager is able to update the shared calendar even when traveling.
- Recurring events: Repeating events, and the options for customizing these recurrences, make it easy for the team to add staff schedules for multiple days or weeks.
- Customized sub-calendars: The sub-calendars are titled with the name, address, and phone number of each location. Having the contact and location information at hand saves everyone time. No one has to look up the details; all they have to do is to check the correct sub-calendar.
- Folder organization: The sub-calendars can be organized by folder; this way, they can be divided into regions, priority, or other factor as appropriate.
- Filters: the pharmacists on staff can search by keyword filter for their name, and find their schedules easily without having to look through the entire calendar.
We are happy using Teamup. As I mentioned it is easy, you can use it on desktop and app, and they always update us with new features.
Thank you to the team at Company M for sharing your story with us.
Header photo by Matt Briney on Unsplash.
