Stop Playing Musical Chairs With Shifts

The Company

Roskam Staffing places temporary workers in light industrial roles across the Antwerp port area. At any given moment they've got around 400 temps on active assignment across five factory clients — packaging lines, logistics hubs, that sort of thing. The clients are big enough to have SLAs with penalty clauses, and Roskam is small enough that keeping those clients happy is more or less the whole business.

The Pain

Lien is the operations lead. Her day starts when her phone does. By the time she gets to her desk around seven, there are already absence messages in the WhatsApp group, voicemails from temps who've called in sick, and a roster that no longer reflects who's actually showing up. She then spends the next two hours manually cross-referencing who's available, which client needs how many people, and who's close enough in skill to cover what. She's doing this from memory and a spreadsheet. Meanwhile one of the factory clients needs a minimum of twelve people on the floor by eight or Roskam is technically in breach. She finds this out at 07:45.

The Move

You set up an agent that runs every night between midnight and six. It watches for incoming absence notifications across whatever channels Roskam uses — SMS, WhatsApp, email. When it picks one up, it checks the live roster, looks at the availability flags for the worker pool, and reads each client's minimum-staffing requirement. By 07:00 it's put together a ranked reallocation plan in plain language: who's out, which clients are at risk, and who to call in first. It also drafts the SMS messages to the workers it's suggesting you contact. Lien opens her inbox, reads the plan, checks it makes sense, and sends the messages. The two hours she was spending on this get handed back to her before the day even starts.

Tools that can do this today: Make or n8n for the automation layer, with an LLM step (Claude or GPT via the API) to handle the reasoning and draft the messages. It connects to whatever your roster lives in — a Google Sheet, Airtable, or a basic staffing system with an API.

The blind spot

Most people look at this and think it needs a developer, a proper integration project, and sign-off from IT. Roskam probably doesn't have an IT department. But the roster is almost certainly already in a spreadsheet or a simple tool, and the absence messages already arrive somewhere readable. The pieces are there. Nobody's connected them yet because it looks like a technical job when it's actually just a setup job you do once.

The pattern

The same kind of move fits in a few other places:

• A cleaning or security contractor running multiple site contracts, where one no-show means a client site is uncovered overnight
• A haulage company where a driver calling in sick at 05:00 needs to be replaced before the first collection window closes
• A catering business running event staff across several weekend bookings, where they're constantly shuffling people between jobs when something falls through