An Australian government public safety authority needs SMS-based shift fill for fire and emergency services with four-layer eligibility filtering and overtime priority ordering. Here is why that is hard and how CloudApper AI Platform for UKG builds it on top of UKG Pro WFM.
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For a public safety agency, an unfilled shift is a coverage risk, not an administrative inconvenience. When a fire station cannot reach minimum staffing before a shift begins, a supervisor is making decisions under time pressure with incomplete information: who is eligible, who last worked overtime, who holds the right certifications, and who can be reached in the next fifteen minutes.
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An Australian government public safety authority, operating Fire and Emergency Services and Police across a geographically dispersed region, needs that handled on top of UKG Pro WFM: filter the eligible pool, sort by overtime fairness rules, broadcast via SMS and let each agency set its own allocation logic. CloudApper AI Platform for UKG, a UKG innovation partner, approaches this as an SMS-based shift fill process built on top of UKG Pro WFM.
The shift fill problem in public safety has four layers
Filling a shift in a retail store is not the same as filling one for Fire and Emergency Services. The worker has to be eligible in four simultaneous ways: right location or agency, correct rank for the open position, confirmed availability, and active certifications for the role. Miss one, and the worker cannot take the shift regardless of willingness. The system has to evaluate all four before any notification goes out, not sequentially but as a single gate.
Then there is the fairness requirement. Overtime in public safety is contested. Workers who have not received overtime recently expect the next available shift to come to them before colleagues who have worked it more recently. Notification order has to be sorted dynamically by each eligible worker’s most recent overtime record. A random or alphabetical list would not survive scrutiny. Poorly managed overtime distribution is not a minor HR complaint. It generates grievances that accumulate fast in unionized workforces, a dynamic that transparent allocation systems address directly.
UKG Pro WFM’s native open shift notification is a solid base for workforce communications. This authority needs an additional layer that can handle eligibility filtering, priority ordering, and SMS delivery at the precision its overtime rules require. CloudApper AI Platform for UKG provides that layer directly on top of UKG Pro WFM’s existing infrastructure.
How the SMS pipeline works
The solution sits between UKG Pro WFM and Twilio’s SMS platform. When a shift opens, the manager picks it from the UKG schedule in a dashboard embedded inside UKG Pro WFM. CloudApper AI Platform for UKG checks eligibility against the UKG workforce data (location, rank, availability, certifications) and excludes anyone who does not clear all four. No message goes out until that check runs.
The remaining pool is sorted by overtime priority: members who have never worked overtime come first, followed by whoever worked it longest ago. The SMS goes out with the shift details, a unique response code and a manager-set expiry window. Replies stream into a board beside the priority list, so the manager can see at a glance whether the member with the oldest overtime said yes.
The alternative is a manager receiving acceptances sorted by name and checking each one against the last-overtime field by hand, which with 100 or more acceptances takes hours. An automated version is faster and documentable, which matters a great deal when someone asks, after the fact, why they were not offered the shift. With SMS as the channel, workers respond through something they already use. No app, no portal login. Notification speed is what determines whether a gap gets filled or becomes an operational problem, something anyone managing last-minute shift call-outs in UKG Pro WFM knows well.
“Because overtime is valuable to the members, they watch this incredibly closely, like a hawk. And so transparency and fairness is a massive element here.”
Workforce Systems Business Analyst, Australian Government Public Safety Authority
Fire gets Manager Discretion. Police gets First-Come-First-Served.
Fire and Emergency Services and Police are both entities within this authority on UKG Pro WFM, but they want different things at the allocation stage.
For Fire: once the SMS broadcast surfaces willing, eligible respondents, the supervisor makes the final call. Crew dynamics, deployment context, incident type: there are things the eligibility filter does not know. The system presents the candidates in priority order. The supervisor decides.
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For Police: first eligible worker to respond gets the shift. No supervisor involvement, automatic confirmation. Speed and consistency matter more than case-by-case discretion, and a fully automated process is harder to dispute.
Same CloudApper AI Platform for UKG platform. Same eligibility filtering, overtime sorting, and SMS delivery. Only the final assignment step differs. The same design can extend to additional agencies with different rules and shift fill preferences without rebuilding, which matters for a government planning to bring more agencies onto UKG Pro WFM. CloudApper builds the approach to scale from the start.
Why the audit trail matters most
Faster shift fill is the visible goal.
The more significant one is the record. The design logs every step: who was in the eligible pool, in what order, who received an offer, when they received it, how they responded, who got the shift. In a collective bargaining environment, that log is what you produce when someone files a grievance about overtime. The answer stops being a supervisor’s recollection. It is a timestamped sequence of events.
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A record like that changes how disputes are handled.
CloudApper AI Platform for UKG extends UKG Pro WFM with the eligibility logic, priority ordering, SMS delivery and configurable allocation modes agencies like these need, and writes the assigned shift back to the UKG schedule so UKG Pro WFM stays the system of record. The goal is a shift fill process that is faster, fairer and auditable.
If your government or public safety organization runs UKG Pro WFM and needs a configurable, SMS-based shift fill process with eligibility filtering and overtime priority ordering, CloudApper can design the right solution. Contact the CloudApper team to start the conversation.
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