Most security guard scheduling software is built for a company running dozens of sites and dozens of guards, and it prices itself accordingly. A single post that just needs to be covered 24 hours a day with a small team doesn’t need any of that — it needs a rest rule, a rule against a day shift the morning after a night, and someone to spread the weekends around fairly. This is a free tool built for exactly that smaller, sharper version of the 24/7 problem, with a solver underneath it instead of a template.
Search for nurse scheduling software and most of what comes up wants a signup and a credit card before it shows you anything. This one doesn’t, and it’s built for the part of nurse rostering that actually breaks ordinary scheduling tools: a ward runs 24 hours a day, so the rest rule, the consecutive-nights cap, and the no-day-after-a-night rule all have to reach across midnight — a boundary a day-by-day template has no way to see at all.
The staff scheduler started as one page: give it your shifts, your people, and your coverage requirements, and it hands back a roster. That’s still true. What changed this week is that the one page became thirteen — a nurse scheduler, a firefighter scheduler, a police scheduler, a warehouse scheduler, and nine more — all running the exact same engine underneath. Same solver, same rules, same workbook format. Different pages. Here’s why I did that instead of leaving well enough alone.
Most call center scheduling tools stop at “cover the phones.” Real call centers don’t work that way. You’ve got English lines, a Spanish queue that only needs a body some of the time, a chat channel that’s grown from nothing to a real share of contacts, and a floor supervisor who has to be reachable every hour the center is open — not because they’re taking calls, but because someone senior has to be there when a call goes sideways.
If you run a plant, a control room, or any operation that never turns the lights off, sooner or later someone hands you a grid of letters and asks you to make sense of it. The DuPont schedule is one of the oldest and most recognizable of those grids: a 4-crew, 12-hour-shift rotation that covers a facility 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and famously gives every worker one full stretch of seven days off in each four-week cycle. It came out of the DuPont chemical company decades ago, and it is still in heavy use in manufacturing, refining, utilities, and emergency services today. It’s one of several rotating shift schedule patterns worth knowing before you pick one for your team.
This post explains what a DuPont schedule actually is, walks through a concrete DuPont schedule example week by week, covers the “modified DuPont schedule” variants people ask about, and touches on the health question that shows up in every search for this topic. At the end I will point you at a free tool where you can build one yourself.
