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Generate, review, and publish a schedule draft

Last updated 2026-08-062 min read

Understand the OpenAI draft action, rule-based bulk workspace, conflict review, and publication boundary.

On this page

Schedule generation creates draft shifts for manager review. It does not publish employee schedules, and generated rows are not visible to employees as published work until a manager completes the normal publish flow.

Generate from the weekly board

  1. Open Schedule → Weekly for the correct week and location.
  2. Select Generate draft and enter the scheduling preferences and constraints.
  3. Ellich sends the request to the configured OpenAI schedule-draft service. An authorized OpenAI API key is required.
  4. Valid returned rows are saved as unpublished draft shifts. Rows with an invalid employee, day, time range, or response format are skipped and reported in the result message.
  5. Review every saved draft on the weekly board before publishing.

Generation can add draft shifts to a week that already contains shifts. It does not automatically replace the existing schedule.

Use the bulk generation workspace

Open Schedule → AI generate to use the rule-based generation workspace. Configure cost, fairness, coverage, hours, rest, and business rules, then generate a preview. The workspace analyzes the proposed rows and displays critical or high conflicts. Select the save action only after reviewing the preview; saved rows remain unpublished drafts.

The bulk workspace uses Ellich's scheduling engine rather than the OpenAI draft endpoint. Despite the page label, it does not require a model response for its generation step.

Review and publish

Check employee availability, overlaps, weekly hours, location, role, and existing shifts. Resolve blocking publish-readiness issues, choose all drafts or selected drafts, acknowledge the staffing and compliance review, and confirm publication. Publication makes the shifts visible to employees and sends the configured in-app and registered-device notifications.

If generation fails, verify active employees exist, the selected tenant and location are correct, and—when using Generate draft—the OpenAI credential is configured.