How to create a demand driver

How to create a demand driver#

For: Admin You’ll need: A plan that includes demand forecasting — Plus or Pro; see How to get demand forecasting.

A driver is the one business number that drives your work: money taken, covers served, parcels sorted, rooms occupied. Everything else in demand forecasting hangs off it. Most companies need one; a few need one per distinct kind of work.

Create it#

  1. Go to Planning → Demand → Drivers.

  2. Click ‘Create’.

  3. Fill in ‘Name’ — what a human calls it, for example Covers.

  4. Fill in ‘Code’ — the lowercase identifier imports and the API use, for example covers. Letters, digits, and underscores only.

  5. Open the ‘Unit’ dropdown and choose what kind of number it is. Money is stored in minor units (cents), though you still enter amounts as you’d write them; counts and durations are whole numbers.

  6. Open the ‘Granularity’ dropdown and choose how finely you can measure it. Quarter hour is only allowed for money and count drivers.

  7. Optionally restrict ‘Locations’. Leave it empty and the driver applies everywhere.

  8. Set ‘Cost of being short’ — see the next section.

  9. Click ‘Save’.

Say what being short costs you#

‘Cost of being short’ is how much worse an understaffed hour is than an idle paid one. 1 means equally bad. 3 means being short costs three times as much as paying somebody to stand around.

That single number decides how defensively the forecast staffs: the higher it is, the further above the average expectation Shiftavo plans. The form shows you the resulting service level as you type, before you save.

If you would rather state the service level directly, fill in ‘Percentile’ instead — a value between 0 and 1, for example 0.8 for p80. An explicit percentile always wins over the cost ratio.

Tip

If you have no idea, leave the cost ratio at its default and revisit it after a few weeks. Forecast vs actual will tell you whether you’re consistently over or under.

Retiring a driver#

A driver with recorded history can’t be deleted — the numbers behind it would go with it. Clear the ‘Active’ checkbox instead. An inactive driver stops appearing in forms and stops being forecast, but its history stays intact.

Verify it worked#

The driver appears in the list under Planning → Demand → Drivers, and ‘Demand plan’ now offers it in the driver selector at the top of the page.