Employee

Within each business, an employee is a person hired to perform a specific job based on an employment agreement, capable of performing different roles and tasks within the business.

What it is used for in Orquest

In Orquest, an employee is linked with the following concepts:

  • Assignment.

  • Aptitude.

  • clockguards.

  • Contract.

  • Service association.

  • Request.

  • Incidence.

Assignment

It is the relationship between an employee and a product or section on a specific day: it establishes the set of tasks to be performed. The assignment is the basic unit of work in the system and the result of the planning process.

Aptitude

Defines the level of competency an employee has for a specific location or task. The different competency levels in Orquest are as follows:

  • 0: the employee cannot perform the task or function due to lack of training.

  • 1: the employee has basic training to perform the task or function.

  • 2: the employee has intermediate training to perform the task or function.

  • 3: the employee has full training and mastery of the task or function.

In Orquest, these levels are represented graphically by an X, an empty star, a half-star, and a full star, respectively.

aptitudes

If a task from the catalog requires a minimum competency level (requiredLevel), the employee must have that level of aptitude to be considered in the planning and to cover that task.

Clockguard

It refers to the record of an employee’s entry or exit at their workplace, whether for worked time or for breaks.

This data is used to accurately track the hours worked by each employee, calculate attendance, work time, and manage work schedules efficiently.

To better understand what a clockguard is in Orquest, it is necessary to distinguish between the following concepts:

  • Clockguard record. Refers to raw data that arrives in the system and can be asynchronous, disordered, etc.

  • Consolidated clockguard. Considered the official clockguard, the system takes it as the actual shift and it is used for planning, payroll, etc. Thus, each consolidated clockguard should be the grouping of two clockguard records, one for entry and one for exit.

  • Validated clockguard. Indicates at the system level that the clockguard has been approved by a clockguard supervisor (human eye). Validated clockguards are frequently used in report generation, but not so much in planning.

Some common errors in clockguard records include, for example, clock-in twice for entry instead of entry and exit, clock-out without any entry, etc. If the consolidated clockguards contain errors from the records, they are discarded in the planning.

Contract

Represents the relationship between an employee and the business: for a person, during a specific period, certain legal restrictions apply. It includes information related to worked hours, vacations, type of work week, additional hours, employee category or position, control period, employee cost, etc.

Contracts cannot overlap: if overlapping contracts are created, an error will occur and the changes will not be applied.

Contract Type

This is a template that provides a predetermined structure for contracts. The contract data defined in the contract type is overwritten when applied to the employee.

Orquest DOES NOT apply contract types to contracts with an end date before the current system date, to avoid applying new restrictions defined afterward to past contracts.

Although a contract type is specified in the API request, if it is not applied because the end date is before the current system date, all required contract values must be set for it to be valid.

Service association

Represents the temporary relationship between the employee and the product or section. It specifies both the scope of the relationship (start and end) and the employee’s availability during this relationship.

This association can also be a cession, meaning a temporary transfer during which the employee will be related to the product they belong to (ownerProduct) and, temporarily, to the product they have been assigned to (product). In this sense, the cession must start and end within the interval defined by the service association.

If the cession repeats every week continuously, always on the same day and for the same period of time, it is a regular cession. Below is an example showing the differences between the various concepts: service association, cession and regular cession.

  • Service association

  • Cession

  • Regular cession

The employee has been working in 0001 since 2022-05-01. In the service association, both ownerProduct and product are the same:

[
    {
        "from": "2022-05-01",
        "ownerProduct": "0001",
        "product": "0001"
    }
]

Within the service association, the employee is transferred to 0002 for one month. In the cession, ownerProduct and product are not the same:

[
    {
        "from": "2022-05-01",
        "to": "2024-09-30",
        "ownerProduct": "0001",
        "product": "0001"
    },
    {
        "from": "2024-10-01",
        "to": "2024-10-31",
        "ownerProduct": "0001",
        "product": "0002"
    },
    {
        "from": "2024-11-01",
        "ownerProduct": "0001",
        "product": "0001"
    }
]

Within the service association, the employee works for 0003 every Wednesday for four hours.

[
    {
        "from": "2022-05-01",
        "ownerProduct": "0001",
        "product": "0001",
        "regularCessions": [
            {
                "daysOfWeek": [
                    "WEDNESDAY"
                ],
                "product": "0003",
                "minutes": 240
            }
        ]
    }
]

Service associations or cessions cannot overlap.

Employee availability

Employee availability refers to the set of schedules, days, and shifts during which an employee can be assigned to various tasks. Currently, there are three ways to define an employee’s availability within a service association:

  • Day type. One or more availability time slots are specified based on the type of day. For example, an employee could be available Monday through Friday from 10:00 to 19:00, on Saturdays from 9:00 to 15:00, and unavailable on Sundays.

  • Shift pattern. Availability time slots, non-availability days, or fixed shifts are specified in rotating patterns for a given time frame. To associate a shift pattern with an employee, it must first be created under Employee management > Shift Pattern.

  • Assignments calendar. Fixed shifts and non-availability days are defined for specific calendar dates. This option is intended for occasions when shifts are agreed upon in advance with employees.

Availability is defined in time intervals that must fall within the service association. Additionally, the day type availability defined in the origin service applies to cession and regular cessions:

  • If the employee has availability defined for the period of the cession/regular cession, that same availability is carried over to the cession/regular cession.

  • If no availability is defined, the default availability for the cession/regular cession period is applied.

To manually edit an employee’s availability from the Orquest interface, this must be done from the corresponding service. Thus, the availability for a cession can only be edited from the service where the employee is transferred.

Request

Refers to a formal request made by an employee to ask for a day off, inform about different availability than usual or apply for a specific shift. This request can be made by the employee through the web application or directly from the mobile application.

Each request made by an employee has a status. The available statuses are as follows:

Requested: indicates that the request has been created and registered in the system but has not yet been processed. Granted: means that the request has been reviewed and approved. Denied: indicates that the request has been reviewed and not approved.

The available types of requests are as follows:

  • Free day.

  • Availability.

  • Shift.

Incidence

Represents any employee absence: vacations, personal days, maternity leave, etc. The types of incidences are defined at the business level and include parameters like duration, possibility of shift assignment, etc.