Shift Schedules That Work for Your Business — and Your People

Most engagements run five to seven weeks from kickoff through employee choice and implementation handoff. Projects involving more departments, larger workforces, or more complex operating environments take longer — but no engagement drags on indefinitely. We scope work before we price it, and the timeline is part of that conversation.

It means the fee we agree to at the start is the fee you pay — regardless of what we find or how long the analysis takes. If the situation turns out to be more complex than anticipated, that is our problem to manage, not yours. The only thing that changes a fee is a material change in scope, agreed to by both parties before additional work proceeds.

Yes, and frequently. Union environments are a significant part of our practice. The employee-centered approach we use aligns well with union interests — workers get a genuine voice, their preferences are documented and respected, and the process is transparent. We work within contract constraints as design inputs from the start of the engagement, not as complications discovered at the end.

Management can pick a schedule, and when they do without employee involvement, roughly half of those changes either fail outright or succeed technically while damaging morale for years. We have cleaned up many of those situations. The reason involvement works is practical: workers who participate in designing a schedule are statistically more likely to support it and less likely to organize against it. The survey process also surfaces constraints — childcare arrangements, second jobs, medical schedules — that management rarely knows about and that can sink a well-designed schedule during implementation.

We have worked across more than 16 industries including manufacturing, distribution, pharmaceutical, chemical, food and beverage, mining, refining, paper and packaging, utilities, and more. The scheduling challenges differ by industry — a continuous chemical process has different constraints than a distribution center with seasonal demand peaks — but the methodology we use is consistent: analyze, engage, implement.

A brief initial call is enough. We want to understand the number of employees affected, how many distinct departments or shift systems are involved, the general nature of the challenge, whether a union contract is in place, and your timeline. We can almost always give you a fee range after a 20-minute conversation — and the first conversation is always free.

Every engagement includes a post-implementation follow-up survey, conducted after the new schedule has been running long enough for employees to form informed opinions. We review results with management, identify any issues that have emerged, and recommend adjustments if needed. Many clients return to us when they expand, when conditions change, or when additional departments are ready for their own review. We have client relationships that have spanned more than a decade and multiple engagements.