Reedsburg PD Cuts Scheduling Time for a Department That Never Sleeps

Reedsburg Police Department operates one of only two dispatch centers in Sauk County, Wisconsin. In addition to providing police services for the city, they also coordinate fire and EMS dispatch across the surrounding county. The agency employs about 33 people across patrol, administration, and dispatch.

Lieutenant Andrew Foesch has spent 27 years with the department. Along with serving as communications supervisor, field training coordinator, and accreditation manager, he’s long handled scheduling for the agency. About a decade ago, he started looking for a way to move employee scheduling off paper and into the digital age.

The binder problem

Before Aladtec, Reedsburg ran its schedule the way many small agencies do: a printed spreadsheet, kept in a binder in the dispatch center. When someone was out for training or a holiday, a supervisor wrote a single letter in a box under the person’s name — a “T” for training, an “H” for holiday — with no additional details.

The paper slips explaining each entry lived in an envelope stuffed into the same binder, so verifying a holiday request or seeing who covered a shift meant searching through document after document. Because five or six people typically needed the schedule at the same time, the binder was a constant bottleneck. Supervisors spent as much time walking it back and forth from the dispatch center as they did actually managing it.

“It just became a little bit messy, too convoluted,” Foesch says of the old process. “It really did become challenging.”

The research led Reedsburg straight to Aladtec

In 2017, the department asked Foesch to look into digital scheduling options. He researched a handful of programs and landed on Aladtec, drawn to how it kept people connected to a live schedule rather than moving their usual spreadsheet online.

Two things sealed the decision to move forward with Aladtec: Foesch could log in from anywhere, either on desktop or from mobile, and coverage alerts sent PTO notifications directly to staff. “It just seemed super easy,” he says. “It was a no-brainer.”

Learning Aladtec was straightforward, thanks to the TCP support team. It was simple as “I want to build a rotation, show me how,” Foesch says. “So not only did they show me step by step, but they would also provide screenshots or video footage of how to do it.”

That responsiveness stuck around well past onboarding, too. Foesch reaches out by phone or email whenever a question comes up and says the team gets back to him quickly and follows through every time. “I’ve reached out by email and phone, and they get back to me super quick,” he says. “Typically, I look at it as a 24/7 avenue.”

Keeping supervisors in the loop

Beyond scheduling, Reedsburg built a set of custom forms in Aladtec to manage day-to-day paperwork, each one permissions-based so the right people fill it out and see it. When someone calls out, a sick leave form now notifies the department’s full supervisory group, five sergeants and three administrative staff, so nobody’s left guessing who’s out or why. A vehicle check sheet form replaced paper pre-trip inspections for the department’s squad cars, routing any flagged issues straight to the two supervisors who manage the fleet.

Time off requests now move just as fast. A supervisor can approve or deny a PTO request in a minute instead of leaving staff waiting days for a paper slip to work its way through the chain.

“It’s an instant response to the employee,” Foesch says, “that they either got honored on their PTO time request or they’ve been denied.”

A welcome end to the manual call list

When Foesch has an open shift, whether from a call-in or an unfilled traffic grant, he can push it out to the whole group instead of slowly working down a call list. Staff sign up by seniority, and he can approve the sign-ups from his phone.

Foesch estimates that working a full call list by phone, checking availability one person at a time, can take a dispatcher 45 minutes to an hour. Sending the shift out through Aladtec cuts that down to minutes, saving staff valuable time.

Less time managing the schedule, more time using it

Every year, Reedsburg’s sworn staff and dispatchers can bid on a new rotation by seniority. When someone decides to keep their current rotation instead of switching, Foesch uses the repeats and rotations feature in Aladtec to update the schedule in a few clicks rather than rebuild the whole thing around one change. Building out a full year’s rotation for more than 30 employees now takes a matter of hours instead of days.

Staff turnover is part of the job, too. When someone leaves the department, Foesch marks them inactive in Aladtec, which cuts off their access right away while keeping their full schedule history intact for the department’s records.

Every change, accounted for

The system log in Aladtec records every change made to the schedule: who granted time off, who adjusted hours, who opened a shift, etc. When a question comes up about a change or how an error occurred, Foesch can trace exactly what took place instead of guessing.

He describes it less as a way to catch mistakes and more as a chance to walk staff through what happened and why. “I could look back at that log and say, hey, the log is saying that you approved it, you deleted them, you opened the hours,” he says. “That’s really powerful, to have a system that’s completely transparent.”

The same visibility carries over to how staff view the schedule day to day. Supervisors and dispatchers can save their own filtered views, showing just the Detective Bureau, just Dispatch, or a single patrol stack, whichever is most relevant to them.

A measurable difference

Foesch doesn’t point to one dramatic before-and-after number. What he describes instead is a steadier, more transparent, and more efficient way of running a department that never really closes.

• Scheduling efficiency – Building and adjusting the yearly schedule now takes hours instead of days. Every change is visible to staff the moment it’s made (and they no longer have to keep track of the binder).
• Coverage and time savings – Open shifts that once meant a 45-minute to hour-long round of phone calls now fill in minutes through group-wide automated alerts.
• Accountability and transparency – A complete system log gives supervisors a clear record of who changed what, turning schedule disputes into quick, factual conversations.
• Staff experience – Faster PTO decisions and self-service mobile access have removed the friction from day-to-day scheduling, something Foesch sees as a real factor in keeping staff satisfied, particularly newer hires.

Still all in almost ten years later

The department has run on Aladtec for almost ten years, and Foesch remains a fan, crediting the responsive support from TCP as much as the software itself.

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TCP Software’s employee scheduling and time and attendance solutions are flexible and scalable to accommodate your business and employees as you grow.

From TimeClock Plus, which automates even the most complex payroll calculations and leave management requests, to Humanity Schedule for dynamic employee scheduling that saves you time and money, we have everything you need to meet your organization’s needs, no matter how unique. Plus, with Aladtec, we offer 24/7 public safety scheduling solutions for your hometown heroes.

Ready to learn how TCP Software takes the pain out of employee scheduling and time tracking? Speak with an expert today.