The Infostrada Sports Group - Recreation Employee Scheduling - Case Study

Case Study: The Infostrada Sports Group in Nieuwegein, Netherlands

Business Overview

The Infostrada Sports Group offers innovative and unique services to the sports industry based in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands. Infostrada Sports Group is active in monetizing sports rights, producing, distributing and publicizing sports content and consulting its partners in how to get the most out of their owned rights. Among others, the Infostrada Sports Group partners consist of broadcasters, event organizers, sports federations, sports clubs, media agencies, brands, sports marketing agencies, publishers, rights agencies, advertising agencies and brands.

One of our biggest departments is the Statistics Department. Here we cover over a hundred different sports, much of it live and deliver the data to our clients. Here lie the roots of Infostrada: around the turn of the century we had around a dozen employees, now the Statistic Department employ around 60 full-time staff and around 80 part-time students.

We’ve been working with part-time students or live operators, for 10 years now to cover live sports. At first we covered a handful of association football leagues, now we cover over a hundred different leagues and around 20 different sports.

Scheduling Overview

The planning of our part-timers is fairly complex; we rely on the ever changeable and flexible world of sports. This makes every day different to the other.

Previous Scheduling Method

Until 2009 we were using an Excel based planning. Once a month the part-time students would submit their availability and this was all updated in a master sheet. Based on that we paired the live operators with available shifts, which were also created using excel. We then use e-mail to inform the live operators of their upcoming shifts.

During the last years of the decade there was a considerable rise in amount of work for our live operators and we needed more of them. Around 2009 we had 40 part-time students on the books and slowly realized that the Excel-based planning had become inefficient and time consuming, plus it was hard to get a good overview of the schedules.

We started looking for a employee schedule maker solution. We created our own software with the creation of actual shifts but also looked for an application that could save on time on the actual planning of live operators and even more importantly: reduce the amount of communication that was involved with our planning process. The most consuming part of that being when the students submit their availability which then had to be processed.

Since ShiftPlanning

After an extensive search and trying out a few applications the work scheduler ShiftPlanning caught our eye. At the time it was still in BETA but it contained the one key feature we were looking for: the live operators would be able to submit their availability without any interference from management control. While we were looking at ShiftPlanning we also found out that Ryan and his team were very receptive to feedback and feature suggestions.

The work scheduler Shiftplanning has drastically reduced the time of our scheduling procedure. We still create the shifts on our internal tool based on the sports program of the day – but then once a week import those shifts onto the work scheduler and start clicking on the names of the people who are available. We hit the publish button and the live operators have their upcoming shifts in their mailboxes.

We could not even imagine how are scheduling would work without Shiftplanning. - Joost Hamilton - Live Coordinator - The Infostrada Sports Group

We also found the trade request feature to be very useful, that also decreased management involved in trades to just one click to approve. We use the data overview to load the schedule back into our internal software program. Other functions we commonly use are the message wall, the various reports and the shift pickup feature; in case we have some extra work lying around.

Further

Recently our Danish office has been starting to use the work scheduler Shiftplanning as well; we now keep track of around 80 part-timers on two locations with ease.