How One Plastics Unit Used Schedule Simulation to Cut 15% in Costs

A Small Team, Complex Constraints

The Plastics Unit at the oldest tertiary hospital in Western Australia operates across public and private care pathways, delivering reconstructive services with a team of physicians in training of 9–11 staff. This appears to be a small in headcount, but it is highly complex to schedule.

The complexity comes from role-specific competencies, relief staff for leave, public holiday coverage, enterprise agreement compliance, and variable clinic demand. All have to be balanced manually, using spreadsheets. Scheduling responsibility sat with administrative staff, while clinical requirements were defined separately. This meant that the two were rarely well aligned.

The deeper problem wasn't the hours spent building schedules. It was that the department had no reliable way to evaluate whether a proposed change to its staffing model would actually work, before committing to it.

Unplanned Overtime Was Absorbing the Workload

The physicians in training did a lot of unplanned overtime after their shifts finished at 4pm. The department believed a dedicated late shift would be better as there would be a clean person for the physicians in training to handover to every day.

Without a way to model the change, the department couldn't answer the questions that mattered: Would it reduce overtime? Would it actually align staffing with demand? What would it cost, and what would it save? What would this change actually look like? What other changes would be needed to make this work?

These were critical questions to answer to create the business case for change, and their manual spreadsheet process offered no way to find out.

RosterLab Built a Model That Actually Works

In February 2026, the department implemented RosterLab, beginning with two foundational steps.

First, establishing a consistent rule framework, translating enterprise agreements, leave policies, and compliance requirements into a structured, repeatable system. Second, modeling the department in detail: shift patterns, service demand, role-specific constraints, and operational edge cases.

The resulting model incorporated more than 28 constraints. What it produced wasn't just a schedule, it was a working simulation of how the department actually operates.

Make the Case for Change with Evidence

With the model in place, the department ran a direct comparison between its existing staffing structure and the proposed late-shift model, incorporating updated shift patterns, clinic schedules, fatigue constraints, and fairness rules.

The simulation gave leadership something they hadn't had before: evidence.

The analysis showed the new model would reduce scheduled labor time, improve alignment between staffing and demand, and generate approximately 15% in cost savings. The department could move forward with confidence rather than assumptions.

The new scheduling system was deployed over six weeks for physician-in-training schedules, with iterative refinement at each stage. Schedule outputs were validated against real operational requirements, and ownership is progressively handed from RosterLab’s implementation team to internal staff.

By working closely together, the staff at the Plastics Unit will be empowered to run their own regular schedule simulations independently, and run a more effective, sustainable service.

Spreadsheets Gone, Overtime Down

The unit now has capabilities it didn't have before:

• Manual spreadsheet scheduling replaced entirely
• Ability to simulate and validate workforce changes before implementation
• Improved alignment between staffing allocation and service demand
• Multi-skill scheduling based on competencies
• Dynamic public holiday staffing adjustments
• Integrated leave coverage through relief staff
• Consistent compliance with enterprise agreements

Scheduling (Scheduling) Done Right Is a Strategic Planning Tool, Not an Admin Task

The lesson from this case isn't just about scheduling efficiency. It's about decision-making.

When workforce planning relies on spreadsheets and institutional memory, leaders are making significant structural decisions with incomplete information. A model-driven approach changes that by turning scheduling from a reactive administrative task into a tool for proactive workforce design.

If your department is considering a change to its staffing model, and wants to know whether it will work before you implement it, that's exactly what RosterLab was built to answer.

"If scheduling still feels like a grind, it doesn't have to be. We've seen what's possible when the right rules and tools are in place, and I'd be happy to show you how it could work for your team." Daniel, Co-Founder, RosterLab

Book a demo → rosterlab.com/book-a-demo