Workforce planning becomes increasingly complex as your organisation grows.
With dozens of planners, multiple projects and hundreds or even thousands of crew members, manually selecting the best person for every position quickly becomes one of the most time-consuming parts of the planning process.
Who should receive this job?
Who still needs contract hours?
Who worked on this project yesterday?
Who has the required qualifications?
Who lives closest to the venue?
The answer is rarely based on a single factor.
Every business has its own priorities.
That’s why SquidWeb introduces the Crew Optimizer.
Instead of manually comparing every available crew member, the Crew Optimizer analyses all eligible candidates, applies your company’s planning rules and instantly recommends the best matches.
Planning based on your own rules
Every company plans differently.
Some organisations prioritise reducing travel distances, while others focus on maintaining team continuity, balancing contract hours or complying with customer-specific planning requirements.
The Crew Optimizer adapts to your planning strategy—not the other way around.
You decide which criteria are most important for your organisation.
Examples include:
- Travel distance
- Team continuity
- Contract fulfilment
- Skills and qualifications
- Working time limits
- Availability
- Required tags
- Company constraints
- Client memberships
- Rate cards
- Block dates
All these factors are considered automatically when generating recommendations.
Configure your optimisation strategy
Every Optimizer Method can be fully customised to match your organisation’s planning strategy.
After creating a new method, planners can define how the Crew Optimizer evaluates and ranks candidates by adjusting multiple configuration areas.
Weight Factors
Weight Factors determine how much influence each criterion has on the final candidate ranking.
The default optimisation methods include factors such as:
- Travel Distance
- Team Continuity
- Contract Fulfilment
Additional weighting factors can be added depending on your planning strategy, including:
- Cost Optimisation
- Membership Bonus
- Fairness
- Spare Priority
- Accounts
- Job Priority
- Skill Bonus
The total weighting across all factors must always equal 100%.
Planner Crews
Select which Planner Crews are included when running the optimisation.
Only crew members belonging to the selected Planner Crews will be evaluated.
Constraints
Define mandatory conditions that every candidate must satisfy before being considered.
Available constraints include:
- Function matching
- Region matching
- Active Rate Card
- Break times
- Blocklist validation
- Working hour limits
Crew members that do not satisfy the enabled constraints are automatically excluded from the optimisation.
Working Time Limits
Configure operational limits such as:
- Maximum working hours per day
- Maximum consecutive working days
These settings help maintain legal compliance and reduce scheduling conflicts.
Block Dates
Choose which unavailable crew members should be excluded from the optimisation.
Supported block types include:
- Self-blocked
- Dispatcher-blocked
- Request-blocked
- No-answer
Output Options
Define how the optimisation results are presented.
Examples include:
- Prioritise existing spare crew
- Number of suggested alternatives
Required Tags
Limit the optimisation to crew members matching specific tags or qualifications.
Notification Settings
Select the notification template that will be used when requesting suggested crew members.
Save and reuse optimisation methods
Once configured, each Optimizer Method can be saved and reused at any time.
Methods can also be shared with different visibility levels:
- Personal – Available only to the planner who created it.
- Company – Shared with all planners within the same company.
- Tenant – Available across the entire SquidWeb tenant.
This allows organisations to standardise planning strategies while still giving individual planners the flexibility to create specialised methods for different customers, projects or operational scenarios.
Create multiple optimisation methods
Planning priorities often vary depending on the customer, project or business unit.
For this reason, SquidWeb allows you to create multiple Optimizer Methods.
For example, you may configure different methods for:
- Festival operations
- Logistics projects
- Premium customers
- Warehouse staffing
- Regional planning
- Different business units
Each method stores its own configuration and can be reused whenever required.
This gives every planner access to consistent planning strategies while still allowing flexibility where needed.
Supporting better planning decisions
The Crew Optimizer is designed to support planners, not replace them.
It provides objective recommendations based on your configured business rules while keeping the final decision entirely under the planner’s control.
Every suggested crew member includes additional information such as travel distance, memberships, skills, planning history and overall ranking, making every assignment more transparent and easier to justify.
Benefits
Using the Crew Optimizer helps organisations:
- Reduce manual planning time
- Improve planning consistency across teams
- Balance contract hours more effectively
- Reduce unnecessary travel
- Maintain team continuity across projects
- Respect company rules and legal constraints
- Improve workforce utilisation
- Support objective assignment decisions
- Scale workforce planning as operations grow
- Improve planning transparency
- Standardise workforce planning across teams
Fully integrated into SquidWeb
The Crew Optimizer is fully integrated into the SquidWeb planning workflow.
Select the missing crew positions, choose an optimisation method, review the suggested candidates and assign or request the crew member that best fits your planning strategy.
No exports.
No spreadsheets.
No manual comparisons.
Just faster, smarter workforce planning.
Watch the tutorial
Want to see the Crew Optimizer in action?
Watch the video below to learn how to configure optimisation methods, adjust planning rules and generate the best crew recommendations directly inside SquidWeb.
