The Rostering Headache
Harmony Aged Care provides Home Care Package services to 110 older Australians in Perth’s northern suburbs. For years, rostering was the single biggest operational headache facing the organisation. Coordinators were managing schedules for 45 casual and part-time workers across seven days, often dealing with late cancellations and scrambling to find replacements at short notice.
“Double-bookings happened every week,” says coordinator manager Bev T. “A worker would be assigned to two clients at the same time because someone updated one roster but not the other. We’d only find out when a client called to ask where their worker was.”
The Maxpilot Rostering System
After implementing Maxpilot’s rostering module, Harmony’s approach to scheduling transformed. The platform enforces real-time conflict detection — if a worker is assigned to overlapping shifts, the system flags it immediately and prevents the assignment from saving.
Workers receive shift notifications via the mobile app and can confirm or flag a conflict directly from their phone. This replaced a system of phone calls and text messages that often went unanswered until the day before a shift.
In the first month, we had zero double-bookings. Zero. After years of dealing with it every week, it just stopped. It was almost hard to believe.
Fill Rates and Worker Availability
Harmony’s shift fill rate improved from around 87% to 95% within three months. The improvement came from two sources: fewer conflicts meant fewer last-minute gaps to fill, and the mobile app’s availability feature allowed workers to indicate their available hours in advance, giving coordinators a clear pool to draw from when replacements were needed.
Coordinator Workload
The 10+ hours per week that rostering coordinators previously spent managing conflicts and chasing workers has been redirected to care quality and client relationship work. “Our coordinators now spend more time actually talking to clients and families,” Bev says. “That’s what they trained for.”