Schej
A web app for companies scheduling a hybrid workforce
Schej is an intelligent scheduling solution which enables its customers to manage their hybrid workforce, maximise collaboration and increase productivity.
Fintek has built the entire technical solution for Schej, from product design through to development and ongoing support.
Challenge
Schej needed to create an app that could intelligently manage hybrid workforces, including coordinating team members with different work preferences: working in the office, working at home, or a bit of both.
Attendance scheduling is a very complex problem. For large organisations with many employees and complex team structures, the number of possible permutations of an attendance schedule are huge. Unlike many other scheduling solutions which are batch-driven, Schej wanted an app which worked in real-time: any change to the company’s employee structure and settings should allow an updated schedule to be generated instantly.
The Schej solution needed to be able to solve this complex computational problem – quickly and at scale.
Country
United Kingdom
Timeline
2020-current
Industry
Human resources
Skills
web development, UX, UI, dev ops
Solution
Scala, Akka, AngularJS, AWS
Fintek worked with a mathematician to develop a scheduling algorithm based on mixed integer linear programming. This algorithm generated an optimal schedule for a team based on factors including maximising office attendance and face-to-face time between key team members. This solution was designed so that it could be easily extended: as Schej learns more about what makes a good schedule, new factors can be included to make the schedule even more useful over time.
We also built a powerful cluster computing system which can split the scheduling work among many different machines. This allows the scheduling system to scale to companies with tens of thousands of employees. As Schej gains more customers, this system means that they can cope with the extra processing load by adding new server capacity with a few clicks.
We integrated with AWS SES, an email service, to send schedules out to employees on a regular basis and to allow them to make changes to their office schedule without leaving their email client.
Following the success of Schej Time, we built an intelligent meeting scheduling add-on to Schej, which works out the best times for meetings to take place based on employee schedules. We worked with the Microsoft Graph and Google APIs to integrate this meeting service with the Microsoft Outlook and Google Workspace services.
Results
Fintek developed an MVP of Schej’s core functionality, called Schej Time, in four months. Schej Time can quickly and accurately generate optimal workplace schedules, even for companies with tens of thousands of employees.
The MVP gave Schej the momentum to put its core team together and onboard beta testers.
For Schej’s first year, our technical founder, Jamie Tidman, served as interim CTO to help guide ongoing technical decisions and for pursuing additional seed funding. Jamie also provided the technical knowledge to help Schej successfully apply for research and development tax relief.
Schej expanded its features to include meeting and meeting room booking management. It’s integrated with Microsoft Outlook and Google Workspace to simplify the workload and administration of large enterprises.
