By rescheduling intraday, you protect your margin in real-time
A schedule that cannot adjust is not a schedule. It is a screenshot.
Most organizations
make their schedules as if the world behaves nicely.
As if no one gets sick. As if an order never changes. As if a customer doesn't suddenly call with “it has to be today” ... and then it's Tuesday.
- 07:12 - someone reports off.
07:18 - an urgent order comes in.
07:30 - a team is at the wrong location because the latest version got stuck “somewhere.”
08:05 - the planner starts to puzzle, calls around, adjusts, sends screenshots… and hopes everyone sees the same truth.
This is exactly why “automatic planning” is so often misunderstood.
The goal isn’t to generate a schedule once a week.
The goal is to continuously replan without chaos—while staying in control of impact, rules, and communication.
The real enemy:
version chaos and interpretation differences
In Excel or separate tools, you almost always get the same symptoms:
- multiple versions (“who has the latest?”)
- many manual corrections (with errors as a byproduct)
- invisible impact (a small change causes downstream trouble)
- post-discussion (hours, surcharges, relocations, responsibility)
What intraday replanning really means
Intraday rescheduling is not "turning everything upside down as soon as something changes."
Intraday rescheduling means:
- Quickly finding a feasible new solution (within the real constraints).
- Minimal changes where possible (maintaining plan stability).
- Making impact visible: what is changing, for whom, and what does it cost?
- Respecting rules: skills, certificates, rest times, staffing, priorities, locations, materials.
- Automatically following up on communication: the right information to the right people.
So you don’t want "a plan." You want a system that repeatedly converges back to a workable reality under pressure.
Intraday rescheduling is also about protecting your margin in practice.
Every last-minute change that you do not catch immediately almost always translates to loss: downtime, extra movements, overtime, incorrect deployment, or late communication. By rescheduling during the day with real-time insight and quick recalculation, you avoid those "margin leaks" while the operation is still running.
The 4 building blocks of good intraday rescheduling.
1) Constraints are not optional.
Availability, schedules, competencies, certificates, locations, materials, rest times... If you do not treat these as hard inputs, you are not planning, you are gambling.
2) Priorities must be explicit.
Urgency over routine? Key client over internal task? Safety over speed? An engine can only be smart if you define what "profit" means.
3) Exceptions must be a first-class citizen.
Sickness, absenteeism, delays, extra work, no-shows… that is not an edge case. That is daily business.
Good software therefore has flows for:
- quick rescheduling.
- escalations/approvals.
- logging: who changed what and why.
4) Schedule stability is a KPI.
Every change has a cost: disruption, miscommunication, mistakes. So an intraday approach shouldn’t just “replan fast”, it should also minimize disruption as much as possible.
How do you measure whether your intraday planning is working?
A few KPIs that do mean something:
- Time-to-recover.: time between disruption and a feasible plan again.
- Fill rate.: how many shifts/tasks effectively filled (with the right skills).
- Schedule stability.: number of last-minute changes per team/shift.
- Overtime & premium hours.: are they rising due to ad-hoc decisions?
- Operational noise.: calls/messages/interrupts needed to "fix it."
If those metrics improve, you get the effect that everyone wants but can hardly "buy": peace of mind.
A small
reality check.
An organization with 50–500+ people can often just about "survive" on heroics: one or two planners who carry everything in their heads. But as volume, variation, and exceptions increase, heroics become costly:
- higher error rates.
- higher stress.
- more dependence on individuals.
- slower response.
- more discussion afterwards.
Intraday replanning isn’t a luxury feature. It’s continuity.
Next blog: replanning is only safe when your skills are right.
Intraday replanning sounds great… until you realize that “available” isn’t the same as “deployable.” In the next blog, we go back to basics: skills-based workforce planning—how to make competencies and certifications the real engine of your planning, without turning it into an administrative nightmare.
Time for the next step?
Do you recognize that “adjusting” for you mainly comes down to putting out fires: calling, shifting, improvising, and correcting afterwards? Then it is not just a planning problem, but a margin problem. Because every change that you cannot reschedule within the day is almost always paid for in extra time, extra kilometers, extra hours, and extra discussion, and you only see that cost when it’s too late.
If that sounds familiar, it’s time to take the step towards a planning that does move with reality. With SOLUTIO, GO-VIRTUAL digitizes your planning so that rescheduling within the day becomes a standard process, with one current plan and clear communication to teams and clients. Do you want to know what that could look like in your organization? Then this is a logical moment to take the next step.
