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About Using the Dispatch Board

The Dispatch Board provides a drag-and-drop interface for manually assigning and scheduling service activities. The Dispatch Board includes the following sections:

• Gantt chart (at the top of the Dispatch Board)
• Unscheduled Activities list (at the bottom of the Dispatch Board)

To schedule activities, users drag and drop the activities from the Unscheduled Activities list to the Gantt chart. You can use specific features of the Gantt chart and the Unscheduled Activities list to improve activity scheduling.

Displayed Schedule Information

The Dispatch Board queries the Siebel database for the schedule information so that it can show any date and time range that the user wants to see. It does not show the content in the Appointment Booking System (ABS) and Optimizer caches. The ABS immediately writes any changes to the Siebel database so that the activities in the Siebel database reflect the cache content. However, activities that you drag and drop in the Dispatch Board are not automatically loaded into the cache. For more information, see Scheduling Using Siebel Scheduler and About Rescheduling Appointments on the Dispatch Board.

Gantt Chart

The Gantt chart shows the scheduled and unscheduled time periods for a group of employees associated with a service region. The chart is divided by a frame boundary into left and right frames.

The left frame lists employees and related information that helps users to select employees for activities. The right frame shows the activities associated with employees in different time periods. The right frame appears in a calendar format. Activities appear in colors that represent priority, status, and type. For more information, see Setting User Preferences for the Dispatch Board (End User).

To see all of the information in the left frame, drag the frame boundary to the right. To zoom in or out on a time period in the right frame, click a zoom interval (1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, or 4) at the top of the Gantt chart.

The date (or the first date of the date range) and service region of the Gantt chart default to the values that you set most recently using the following methods:

• From the application-level menu, select Tools, then User Preferences. On the link bar, click Dispatch Board, and select the appropriate options. If you select a value of Today in the Date Shown field, then the date (or the first date of the date range) on the Gantt chart is today. If you select a value of Last Date Chosen in the Date Shown field, then the date (or the first date of the date range) on the Gantt chart is the date that displayed when you last left the Dispatch Board.
• From the Activities List view of the Activities screen, drill down on the Status field for an activity. The date (or the first date of the date range) on the Gantt chart defaults to the field values in the Schedules view of the just-visited activity. This date is the Planned Start date field for the activity. If this field contains no data, then this date is the Earliest Start date field for the activity. If this field contains no data, then this date is the date designated in the user preferences for the Dispatch Board. The service region on the Gantt chart of the Dispatch Board defaults to the Service Region field for the activity. If this field contains no data, then the Gantt chart contains no data.

The Gantt chart data is associated with a designated service region. Each service region is associated with a time zone. To change the service region and time zone for the Gantt chart data, click the Select Service Region button.

NOTE:  To accurately display an employee schedule, the time zone associated with the employee in the Employees view of the Administration - User screen must be the same as the time zone associated with the service region of the Gantt chart.

Unscheduled Activities List

By default, the Unscheduled Activities list displays all activities that have a status value of Unscheduled. To change the number of records that appear on the list, click the show more button and the show less button.

In addition to unscheduled activities, you can select the following views in the visibility filter:

• Declined Activities
• Timed Out Activities
• Not Acknowledged Activities