Working with Workers Beer Company, in 2016 we developed a scheduling system for bar staff used at several major UK festivals including Glastonbury, Latitude, Leeds and Reading festival since 2015.

Aduro we brought in to transform the way Workers Beer Company manage and schedule staff to bars. Workers Beer Company had the same problem at every festival where they would scramble to get together schedules and shifts via Microsoft Excel on the two days before the festivals opened their doors to the public.

This was because Workers Beer Company does not know how many staff will show up to work until the casual workers and volunteers, who have previously pledged that they will work, begin to show up and set up camp at the festival during these two days before the festival opens. During these two days, Workers Beer Company manually register staff on the system when they show up to confirm their place.

Aduro observed where the main problem points were for Workers Beer Company and came up with a strategy to automatically schedule staff to shifts over the festival weekend based on a set of sensible rules. Rules such as ensuring long enough breaks between the daily shifts, some of which finish at 4 am and some which begin at 10 am.

Other rules were implemented such as ensuring that once the AI allocates one group of staff together on a particular bar, it attempts to re-allocate the same group of staff together on the same bar on the following days to improve familiarity and productivity. The system does all this while intelligently ensuring certain bars have enough staff to cover projected demands based on when popular artists are playing on stages nearby.

The first version was developed in the spring of 2014 and trialled at Glastonbury 2014. This was a partial success though had some significant failures. The Aduro team made sure Workers Beer Company were fully supported and helped to them to deliver a set of schedules and shifts to give to the staff while partially using the system and making some manual adjustments.

During spring 2015, Aduro and Workers Beer Company ironed out these failures and had plenty of time to test out scenarios on the system to make sure it could solve the most complex real-life problems that Workers Beer Company come across during the festivals. The final version was used with 100% success rate at Glastonbury, Leeds and Reading 2015 festivals, and have been used at these events ever since. The system has also been used at some smaller festivals including Latitude Festival since 2017.

Aduro and Workers Beer Company continue to work together and have been planning how they can automate the registration process via a mobile app during the two days prior to the festival opening its doors.