Moving a crew between two sites looks like a logistics decision. Under Ontario's employment standards it is also a payroll decision and sometimes a compliance one, and those are the constraints worth encoding first.
Key takeaways
Every contractor running more than one active site has the same weekly problem: four crews, six sites, two people who can run a machine, and a plan that survives until Tuesday morning. It is a genuine optimization problem and software helps with it.
But before optimizing anything, it is worth writing down the constraints that are not negotiable, because in Ontario several of them are statutory and one of them is routinely missed.
Travel. Ontario's guide to hours of work under the Employment Standards Act draws a specific distinction: commuting between home and work is not work time, but if an employee has a usual workplace and is required to travel to another location to perform work, the time travelling to and from that other location counts as work time. Time spent travelling during the course of the workday is work time. And if an employee is required to transport other staff or supplies to or from the workplace or work site, that time must be counted as work time too.
Read that against a typical multi-site week. A framer who normally reports to site A, sent to site B on Wednesday, is not simply commuting somewhere else. The crew member who picks up two labourers and a load of material on the way is on the clock from the moment that starts. A schedule that treats every site as an equivalent start point is understating hours, which understates cost and can understate overtime.
Ontario limits worth encoding as rules, not reminders
Daily limit: eight hours, or the number of hours in an established regular workday if that is longer. Exceeded only by an electronic or written agreement between employee and employer.
Weekly limit: 48 hours, again only exceeded by electronic or written agreement.
Overtime: begins after 44 hours in a work week, at one and a half times the regular rate. An agreement to work extra hours does not remove the overtime obligation.
Daily rest: at least 11 consecutive hours off work each day, which generally cannot be contracted away.
Between shifts: at least eight hours off, unless the total time worked on both shifts is 13 hours or less.
Weekly rest: at least 24 consecutive hours off in each work week, or 48 consecutive hours in every two consecutive work weeks.
Those figures come from the same hours of work guidance and the overtime pay guidance. Certain industries and job categories are exempt from the hours-of-work rules, and some roles have a different overtime threshold, which is exactly the sort of exception that belongs in a written configuration rather than in a scheduler's memory.
One more rule worth encoding directly: Ontario's three-hour rule entitles an employee who regularly works more than three hours a day, but is sent home after working less, to whichever is higher — three hours at their regular rate, or their actual hours worked topped up with wages to the equivalent of three hours — unless their regular shift is three hours or less, or the shortfall was beyond the employer's control. That exception is the one that matters for a multi-site schedule: a crew sent home by a weather stand-down or a site shutdown can fall outside the rule, but a crew simply reassigned poorly does not.
Two more, easy to forget on a construction crew: training required by the employer or by law counts as work time, and since March 2024 a person working a trial shift is an employee under the ESA, so those hours count as work time as well.
The useful architecture is boring and it is the reason this works at all. Encode the rules as hard constraints. Let the tool propose assignments that satisfy them. Have a person approve.
Never let the constraint set live only inside a prompt. A rule written into a scheduling system is auditable and testable; a rule described in a sentence to a language model is neither, and it will be silently dropped the week your prompt gets edited.
Assignar documents scheduling crews and equipment across multiple projects, assigning workers, crews and equipment based on qualifications and availability, with role-based recommendations and conflict alerts, and the ability for field staff to add roles, workers and equipment to work orders and update the schedule from a mobile app.
Bridgit approaches the same problem as workforce planning: a single view of projects, roles and people, with internal profiles covering job history, skills, certifications, location and availability, plus forecasting of upcoming needs. Its AI features are described as agents that can propose a full team for a project and turn questions into reusable reports, with the vendor stating that the user approves every action.
Qualifications matter more than availability in Canadian construction and the tools reflect it: a certification that lapses is a scheduling constraint, and the systems above treat certification data as a field to schedule against rather than a filing cabinet.
Half the point of multi-site scheduling is deciding who is yours and who is called in. Which of those a worker is has consequences well beyond the schedule — hours rules, overtime, workers' compensation and payroll all turn on it, and the label on the invoice does not settle it. Our sister firm's answer on how to tell whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor in Ontario is the place to start before you build a scheduling system that assumes one or the other.
A mechanical contractor runs three active sites in one region: a school retrofit, a retail fit-out and a small industrial job forty minutes out of town. Two crews of four, one crew of two, and one certified operator shared across all three.
The naive weekly plan sends the shared operator to the industrial site on Tuesday morning and back to the school in the afternoon. Encoded properly, that plan carries roughly eighty minutes of travel time as work time, plus the material pickup that was assumed to be free. Over a month, across three people, that is a real number that was previously invisible.
The scheduling pass returns two alternatives: keep the operator on one site per day and accept a one-day delay at the school, or split as planned and absorb the travel. Both are legitimate. The point is that the second option now shows its true cost, which is the entire benefit of encoding the constraint.
The structure does; the numbers do not. Every province sets its own hours-of-work, rest and overtime standards, and construction is a common area for exemptions and special rules. Configure per province and never assume Ontario's thresholds travel.
It can propose one. The approval step is not a formality — assignment decisions carry safety, competence and legal consequences, and those belong to a named supervisor.
Current certifications with expiry dates, real availability including booked time off, site locations, and honest travel times. The third and fourth are the ones companies skip, and they are the ones that make the output credible to the people being scheduled.
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