ITN selected time and attendance systems to plan and roster its News Production crews and provide management information about its workforce.

"Open Options provides ITN with a single Workforce Scheduling and management information system, which we can use across all aspects of our business. It replaces a number of legacy solutions delivering a single point of reference about our roster patterns Working Time Directive reports and business information relating to staff working arrangements," said Keith Cass, Director of technology.

She also added that it had reduced their administration by bringing together in one system their Workforce Scheduling of staff, the monitoring and tally of hours worked plus training and sickness reporting. There are no Excel spreadsheets, managers and staff all has immediate access to their personal and department information via the company intranet.

Nevertheless, the Working Time Regulations were the catalyst for introducing a new system as previously ITN had many solutions for Workforce Scheduling crews, the monitoring of attended time and absence reporting. Using one system, staff would be rostered and the details of their working patterns for monitoring goals entered into another. This showed that management information was difficult and time consuming to produce. There was obviously a need for a company wide system to manage all of these areas.

An initial survey of software suppliers had failed to find a suitable package solution for ITN's needs. Nevertheless, Crown Computing’s Open Options was identified as a system with the needed potential and resulted in Crown enhancing its Resource Planning module to meet ITN’s Workforce Scheduling requirements.

But this module has undergone a successful pilot within the Channel 4 News Production area. And it is now being rolled out to other areas of ITN. ITN can report on all aspects of workforce time, including compliance with Working Time Regulations. It is allowed for crews to be rostered for all ITN's television and radio news programmes and for the schedules to be published on ITN's Intranet site, for the profit of employees and management.