Siebel Field Service Guide > Scheduling and Dispatch > Scheduling Administration >

Guidelines for Setting Up Scheduling

Consider the following when setting up Siebel Scheduling:

• Business model. What is your business model? What part does scheduling play? Which Siebel application modules are you using?
• Service regions. Plan service regions so that movement of service personnel between regions should be the exception. Geographic areas that define service regions may overlap. In addition, service regions can have parent regions that effectively widen the primary service region when manually assigning activities using the Dispatch Board. Thus, resources can be shared across areas by setting up region hierarchies.
• Server mapping. Set up servers and processors to distribute the scheduling tasks efficiently.
• Employees. Assign employees to service regions.
• ZIP or Postal Codes. Load ZIP Code and geocode data.
• Constraints. Set up two types of constraints for the Optimization Engine:
  • Hard constraints. The ABS and Optimizer cannot violate hard constraints. Activities that do not fit these constraints are not scheduled. As a result, the engines are faster in finding solutions, but fewer solutions are obtained. The solutions result in higher costs for service.
  • Soft constraints. The Optimizer can weight the cost of using or violating a soft constraint when calculating solutions for a schedule. Soft constraints result in longer optimization times (lower performance of the Optimizer), more solutions, and lower costs for service. The result of violating soft constraints may be a more costly schedule.

    The ABS uses only hard constraints. The Optimizer can use either hard or soft constraints.

    CAUTION:  Do not define contradictory constraints. For example, the following two constraints conflict if both are hard constraints and the duration for the activities is less than two hours:
    
    A field service engineer must work a minimum of four hours per day.
    
    A field service engineer can have no more than two activities per day.

• Cost functions. The Optimizer calculates a cost function for each proposed schedule. This function is the sum of factors that drive the optimization of a schedule; for example, the cost of overtime, travel distance, and penalties for violating soft constraints. For more information, see Cost Function.