Automating a Weekly On-Call Rotation That Used to Take Hours to Plan

The Challenge

A data support team's weekly shadow/on-call rotation was planned by hand — balancing who was on PTO, who had already covered high-effort tasks recently, and team-specific approval rules. It was tedious, error-prone, and fell on one person's shoulders every week.

The Approach

ELIX built a rules-driven scheduling bot that encodes the team's actual constraints, including seniority-weighted task assignment, exclusion of whoever is on-call that week, and mandatory multi-coverage for low-effort tasks. It delivers the finished schedule into the team's existing chat tool. Rather than a black-box AI guess, the logic is transparent and auditable so the team can see why someone was assigned a task.

The Outcome

• Reduced weekly schedule planning from a manual task to an automated, few-minute review.
• Eliminated a recurring source of scheduling disputes by making the rules explicit and consistent.
• Built as a small, maintainable service rather than a fragile script — easy for the team to extend.

Tools & Stack