Team 40 - Vistar Eye Center - Employee Scheduling with Optimization and Dashboard

Employee Scheduling with Optimization and Dashboard

Vistar Eye Center, a leading ophthalmology practice in Southwest Virginia, schedules nearly 200 employees daily across twelve clinics. Prior to this project, scheduling relied on manual processes that delayed response to callouts and created coverage gaps. Without a centralized database or filtering tools, scheduling managers spent excessive time identifying qualified staff, while clinic managers maintained separate paper schedules to manually edit schedules. The team improved scheduling efficiency by developing a Python-based automated scheduling program and an Excel-based dashboard. Using the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) methodology, the team identified inefficiencies and iteratively refined both tools. The automated scheduling program applies a multi-objective optimization model to minimize day-to-day location changes for cross-location employees, reducing travel and maintaining consistent clinic assignments. The dashboard integrates a filterable schedule and employee database, enabling data-driven staffing decisions across the Vistar network. The solution automated non-clinical scheduling and streamlined clinical rework, reducing initial schedule creation time from 45 to 9 labor hours and backfill search time from 10 to 3 minutes. These improvements lower administrative burden and shift scheduling responsibilities away from office managers. As a result, Vistar consolidated to a single scheduling manager and avoided planned investments in external scheduling systems, yielding an estimated $100,000 in annual labor reallocation and $24,000 in annual cost avoidance. By implementing automated and data-driven scheduling, Vistar reduces unnecessary staff travel and ensures consistent coverage across locations.