Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
The search for a Deputy alternative almost always starts the same way: the roster grows, the per-user fee grows with it, and someone asks whether a scheduling tool should really cost as much as a part-time shift. After twenty-plus years building optimization models professionally, I built my own answer — my free staff scheduling optimizer — and made it free: no per-user fee, no account, and a real solver doing the actual scheduling work.
Most people hunting for a When I Work alternative aren’t angry at the product — they’re doing per-user math. Multiply a monthly fee by every employee on the roster, add the time-tracking add-on, and a “cheap” tool quietly becomes a real line item. I’ve built scheduling optimization models for twenty-plus years, and my answer to that math is my free staff scheduling optimizer: it costs nothing, needs no account, and — unlike most scheduling apps — it actually builds the schedule instead of giving you a nicer grid to fill by hand.
Ask ten small fleets how to plan a delivery route and nine will describe some version of the same ritual: a list of addresses, a map, and somebody’s gut feeling about which order “makes sense.” I’ve spent years building routing models for real operations, and the gap between a gut-feel route and an optimized one is rarely small — it’s usually measured in whole driver-hours per day. The good news: planning delivery routes properly is a repeatable process, and most of it isn’t even math. It’s preparation.
So what is VRP, exactly? It stands for the vehicle routing problem, and it’s the three-letter answer to a question every delivery operation asks itself before sunrise: which vehicle should visit which stops, and in what order? I’ve spent a good chunk of my career as an operations research analyst building routing models for real fleets, and I still think VRP is the most practical piece of math most people have never heard of. If a truck brought you anything this week, a VRP solver (or a dispatcher sweating over a map) decided how it got there.
If you have ever searched for a 12 hour shift schedule template, you already know the problem: the internet is full of pretty grids that show you what a rotation looks like, but almost none of them actually build a working schedule for your team, with your people, your coverage minimums, and your time-off requests. A static template is a picture of a schedule. What you usually need is the schedule itself. This post is the “start here” overview: what a 12-hour shift schedule is, the trade-off you are really signing up for, the named patterns worth knowing, and how to skip the download-and-fight-with-a-spreadsheet step entirely.
