The primary expenses for healthcare organizations are salary-related costs because operating them requires massive man-hours from various positions and job functions. As such, a firm grasp of staffing plans is crucial in managing healthcare organization. Planning nurses' shifts, for example, is a really intricate task considering the various factors to be taken care of in drawing out feasible schedules to ensure the smooth running of the healthcare organizations and their staff's satisfaction. The experience levels of the nurse, his or her specialties, competencies, turnover and skill mix are amongst factors to be considered when drafting staffing plan and shifts scheduling that is fair, effective and unbiased. The fact that the healthcare industry has the largest percentage of part-time workers, 16%, makes staffing plans even more challenging due to the lack of commitment, lack of skill mix and the high turnover rate among part-time staffers (S. Leiyu, 2007).

Shifts and nurses go in tandem; there are no two ways about it. A preferred and traditional shift is an 8-hour shift with a variable of 10 or 12-hour shifts or a mixture of all three. Studies on both nurses and physicians have indicated that working 8-hour shifts on a 5-day rotation has been proven to improve patient care as compared to 12-hour shifts on a 3-day rotation. However, the 10 and 12-hour shifts provide more added advantages to the staff such as consecutive days off, more weekend days off and many more, but these shifts would require more staff and may gradually increase staff fatigue. In nurse working environment, there are also 4-hour shifts useful for peak activity periods and part-time staff, (Polly. G.Z. 2002). Combined with staff rotations, weekend requirements, requests, holidays and vacation days, managing staff scheduling is definitely a challenge to maintain service quality and order, and the choice in shift pattern can affect turnover, absenteeism and job satisfaction amongst the involved staff.

On top of the different shift types, there are different types of work schedules for nurses such as cyclical (permanent) or flexible (discretionary). Under the cyclical work schedule, employee's shifts are constant. The schedules are usually planned for a four to six-week period and is repeated period after period. The good thing about this is, the plan is stable and the system allows the employees to select the shift that best fits their schedule. However, having chosen that, the nurses are locked into that shift. Flexible shifts, on the other hand, provide flexibility to the hospitals to assign work schedules yet the planning of flexible schedules requires the management to continuously change the schedule to fit the requirements of the hospitals and match it with the availability of labor.

Biometric terminals make up one crucial part to assure accurate collection of data; the management software is crucial to determine the availability and the accuracy of data and reports. With the software, all data from the terminals will be treated according to the rules, settings and policies set in the application.

TimeTec TA, an online comprehensive and powerful time control management application is compatible with all FingerTec Webster-loaded biometrics time attendance devices. TimeTec TA comes complete with powerful features, allowing users to automate company's housekeeping, attendance tracking, labor scheduling, data collection and access control in a centralized database, accessible online by authorized administrators and also users.

With 31 highly sought after types of reports and listings, TimeTec TA can definitely solve the common time-management related labor problems in the hotel industry.

Take one sample where one hospital uses 12-hour shifts of three-on, three-off. This means that staff work three weekends (assuming Friday is a weekend) in a row and then have the next three weekends off. It is appealing to staff because there are 8 days off in a row, hence, they get a "mini-vacation" every 6 weeks.

Regardless of the schedule type preferred by a healthcare organization, TimeTec TA is able to cater to various schedules possible, cyclical or flexible.

The software has features suitable for setting up hospital nurses' staffing schedules. It can contain up to 999 schedules and 999 groups and link up to 999 combinations of FingerTec biometric and card terminals to one centralized application. Using TimeTec TA could save considerable time in schedule planning because all the possible schedules that the organization might be using can be preset in the system waiting for them to be assigned to the relevant nurses. TimeTec TA provides rules that can be set according to the healthcare organization's policies and such; rules on clocking, time range, general, tolerance, break and overtime for each schedule can be specifically defined.

With every rule, policy, data, staff information and activities stored in one server, these records and reports could be retrieved at any time, from anywhere. Healthcare organization could improve in the way it runs its nurses and manage their effectiveness in patient care.

System automation definitely brings substantial benefits to large organizations and automation on staff attendance is especially crucial for places such as healthcare organizations that are labor intensive. Improvements on the staffing system are expected to improve labor time utilization, effectively reduce excessive labor cost and strengthen the management of the entire human resources.

Looking at it closely, nurse scheduling management can be better managed by the introduction of biometric verification systems and powerful time control management software, which can handle not only nurses' time attendance but also their intricate shifts scheduling. Biometric systems such as fingerprint and face have been proven to be reliable and convenient, able to reduce the question mark of who's who in attendance reporting. And when all data and records are centralized, making them accessible to relevant higher level personnel, they can then save a lot of time and headache on scheduling nurses' shifts.

An investment on automation system could be seen as costly but with the accuracy of data and its efficacy in handling all the necessary functions, in the long run, it'll still be beneficial to the organizations.