A distribution center runs on three jobs that all draw from the same headcount but aren’t interchangeable: picking orders, packing them, and moving pallets — except only some of your people are actually certified to drive the forklift. Schedule that wrong and you either have idle pickers standing around a jammed dock, or a certified operator stuck packing boxes while nobody can move a pallet.
A certified skill, modeled as a certified skill
The warehouse sample models Picker and Packer as volume demands, both weighted higher during the mid-shift order-volume peak, and ForkliftOperator as its own demand covering the receiving and put-away hours. The difference from the other verticals: only four of the twelve people in the sample carry the forklift skill. That’s not a rounding error — it’s the point. The skills table is exactly where a certification requirement belongs, and the solver simply won’t assign forklift coverage to someone who isn’t tagged for it, the same way it wouldn’t assign a Spanish-language call to an agent who doesn’t speak Spanish.
Supervisor coverage without a dedicated body
ShiftSupervisor runs the same way it does everywhere else in this tool: a concurrent presence demand, satisfied by whichever senior picker or packer is already scheduled for some other reason. Three people in the sample carry that skill, spread across both shifts, so the requirement gets covered without anyone being scheduled purely to stand around and supervise.
Try it with a warehouse sample already loaded
The built-in sample is a 12-person distribution center — picking, packing, forklift, and shift-supervisor coverage, 6am to 10pm, Monday through Saturday (no overnight shift in this version yet — that’s a feature still on my list).
Open the warehouse scheduler — no signup. Bring in your own roster, demand numbers, and certifications once you’ve seen it run.
What it needs from you
Hourly demand for picking, packing, and forklift work, who’s available when, and who actually holds the forklift certification. Break rules and weekly hour caps are parameters you set once. This is also the closest preview I have right now of the Warehouse Slotting model that’s next on my list for this series — different problem, same underlying idea of matching skilled supply to real demand.
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