Siebel Field Service Guide > Setting Up and Using Scheduling > Reloading the ABS and Optimizer Caches >

Loading Employee Data for Service Regions

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

A field service engineer can belong to only one service region. This rule applies because employee information is cached in memory for performance reasons. Also, if each Siebel Scheduler process has its own cache, employees cannot be in more than one cache at a time—otherwise, each instance of Scheduler would produce conflicting schedules for the employee. Attempting to keep two service regions synchronized around common employees would consume heavy amounts of resources and would be difficult to manage.

Employee data is loaded with service region data into the ABS or Optimizer cache. You can do this manually or with the Workflow Manager. When activities are loaded, Assignment Manager retrieves the list of eligible employees and the ABS or Optimizer loads this data.

When you load the data for a new employee, the list of employees eligible for existing activities is not updated. The result is that the new employee may not be eligible to carry out any of the existing activities, but is eligible for new activities. At the next reload of the service region and its employee data, the new employee is eligible for all activities.

Service regions are specified for employees using the Service Region field on the Administration - User screen > Employees > Service Details view. All the employees for a particular service region are then listed on the Administration - Scheduling screen > Service Region List > Employees view.

To manually load employee data

1. Navigate to the Administration - Scheduling screen > Service Region List view.
2. Select a service region record and drill down on the Name field hyperlink.
3. Click the Employees view tab.

   The Employees view lists the employees assigned to a service region. This view is read-only.

4. Select the employees who should be loaded for the service region.
5. Click the Load ABS button.

   Clicking this button sends an asynchronous request to the Optimizer to refresh the data for one or more selected employees in the ABS cache. This command must be initiated manually or by the Workflow Manager; do not use a repeating component job.

To remove data for an employee from the ABS cache

1. Navigate to the Administration - Scheduling screen > Service Region List view.
2. Select a service region record and drill down on the Name field hyperlink.
3. Click the Employees view tab.
4. Select an employee record and click Unload ABS.

   Clicking this button sends an asynchronous request to the Optimizer to remove the data. This command must be initiated manually; do not use a repeating component job.