Siebel Field Service Guide > Setting Up and Using Scheduling >

Defining Employee Availability and Schedules

This task is a step in Process of Setting Up Scheduling.

Employee schedules (available and unavailable hours) are controlled by the Schedule field in the Administration - User screen > Employees > Service Details view and the exception records in the Administration - User screen > Employees > Employee Exception Hours view. The definition of the schedules that appear in the Schedule field are set in the Administration - Service screen > Schedules view.

The ABS uses the service region schedule as a base, and then refines its choices of time slots based on the employee schedules. See Defining Schedule Hours for more information. The Optimizer uses the employee schedules only.

To define employee availability and schedules, perform the following tasks:

• Defining Hours for Employees
• Adding Employee Schedule Information
• Specifying Employees as Unavailable

Rules for Defining Employee Schedules

When setting schedules for field service engineers, you must follow these rules:

• A schedule must have only one shift start per day.

  To set up multiple shift start times, use multiple schedules, each for a separate shift.

• The Shift Start flag should be set on the first time period in a day (the exception being when a shift extends over two days).

  If a shift spans more than one day (for example, Monday 9-11:59 P.M. and Tuesday 12-4 A.M.) the first day should include the start of the shift.

• The ABS, but not the Optimizer, can have activities that span more than one day.
• It is recommended that no more than 150 employees be used for each service region, particularly if your company is using optimization.
• You can schedule one or more breaks in a day.
• The ABS does not consider overtime for a field service engineer.
• The Optimizer can schedule activities in overtime and extended overtime.

CAUTION:  Do not define breaks during overtime. The Optimizer ignores breaks that are scheduled during overtime and treats them as working time. This introduces inaccuracies into cost calculations.