Schedule adherence calculator
Adherence, conformance and availability get used interchangeably and mean different things. Enter the minutes from one shift, or a team's day, and this calculator gives all three plus the not-ready rate, and shows which minutes each one counts.
Time in the scheduled state ÷ scheduled time.
- Conformance
- 96.9%
- Availability
- 92.5%
- Not-ready rate
- 7.5%
- Minutes out of adherence
- 30.0 min
Logged-in time ÷ scheduled time, regardless of when.
Ready or handling ÷ logged in.
Show the working
- Adherence = 450 in the scheduled state ÷ 480 scheduled = 93.8%. Right thing, right time.
- Conformance = 465 logged in ÷ 480 scheduled = 96.9%. Right amount of time, whenever.
- Availability = (465 − 35) ÷ 465 = 92.5%. Share of logged-in time ready or handling.
- Not-ready rate = 35 ÷ 465 = 7.5%.
Doing this for every interval of the week? Pebble WFM computes the requirement from your forecast and builds the roster. Free month, no card needed.
How adherence, conformance and availability differ
Adherence asks whether the agent was in the scheduled state at the scheduled time: on a break during the scheduled break, on the phones during scheduled phone time. It is minutes in the right state divided by scheduled minutes. Ten minutes late and ten minutes of overrun at the end is twenty minutes out of adherence even though the total time worked is right.
Conformance asks only whether the amount of time was right: logged-in minutes divided by scheduled minutes. It forgives shifting a break by half an hour, which is why it is the kinder number and the less useful one for a planner, since the requirement curve cares exactly when people are on the phones.
Availability looks inside the logged-in time: how much of it was ready or handling, as opposed to not-ready states. It is an agent-behaviour and process measure, and together with the not-ready rate it is where within-interval shrinkage shows up.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a good adherence target?
- Most centres set 90 to 95 per cent. Above that the tolerances become punitive; a five-minute grace either side of a break is common and should be built into the measurement rather than the target.
- Why can adherence be low when conformance is 100%?
- Because the time was right and the timing was not. An agent who takes lunch an hour early conforms perfectly and is out of adherence for two hours. The requirement curve was built around the scheduled lunch, so the queue feels the difference.
- Is availability the same as occupancy?
- No. Availability is the share of logged-in time an agent could take a contact; occupancy is the share of that available time actually spent handling one. An agent can be 95 per cent available and 70 per cent occupied.
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