Automated workforce scheduling

In 2021, Eco Wash's operations manager was spending tens of hours every week building staff schedules by hand. With more than 30 employees, seven-day operations, and a tangle of rules around shift distribution, rest days, and team composition, Excel wasn't cutting it anymore. They needed room to grow.

The real challenge

This wasn't about replacing a spreadsheet with software. It was about encoding how their business actually works, and doing it in a way that could flex when things change.

Eco Wash runs a laundry operation with three employee groups: women, men, and drivers. They need at least 18 people on the floor daily, with minimum driver coverage. Certain days require more heavy lifting. Everyone needs at least one weekend off per month. No one works more than five consecutive days. And then there are the edge cases, like people who share transportation and need aligned schedules.

Getting the rule prioritization right was the crux of it. When constraints conflict, and they always do, the system needs to know what matters most. We worked through these trade-offs together, mapping out which rules were hard boundaries and which could bend.

What it does

The manager logs into a web portal to view current schedules and generate new ones. Employees can check their assignments. Generated schedules can be adjusted manually if needed, then exported as Excel or PDF.

We considered building a flexible rules engine that could be modified without redeploying. We decided against it. The rules weren't going to change often enough to justify the complexity and cost.

What changed

What took tens of hours now takes less than five minutes. Instead of planning four weeks ahead, they're planning months ahead.

Their manager got that time back. Fewer errors meant fewer fires to put out, and with scheduling off their plate they could focus on what actually mattered: hiring more people and scaling the operation.

The system ran for three years without needing new features. We still push security updates, but the application just works. That's what good software should do: solve the problem and then get out of the way.