Siebel Field Service Guide > Scheduling and Dispatch > Schedules >

Business Requirements for Scheduling

Typically, businesses that schedule personnel have the following needs:

• Match the right person to an activity, depending, for example, on the skills required for that activity.
• Minimize the cost of service. This usually means minimizing overtime, down time, and travel.
• Respect contractual commitments (for example, service personnel must be onsite within 24 hours).

Businesses have to schedule service for three different time spans:

• For emergencies today, making sure that the best person can respond in the promised time frame.
• For the jobs occurring over the next week or two, ensuring that the appropriate people are efficiently utilized and not spending excess time traveling from site to site.
• For the weeks and months ahead, booking future jobs such as preventive maintenance and installations, using available resources efficiently.

Siebel Field Service provides these tools for assigning and scheduling activities:

• Manual assignment. Manual assignment is available in any Activities view, where a dispatcher or customer service representative can fill in the Employees field. For procedures, see Assigning and Scheduling Field Service Activities.
• Dispatch Board. This screen lets a dispatcher or customer service representative manually assign and schedule individual activities by dragging and dropping an activity onto a Gantt chart.
• Assignment Manager. This function provides a list of personnel who are qualified to carry out a service activity or service request. The list, based on a set of rules, is ranked by a score that indicates the engineer's suitability. The dispatcher or customer service representative chooses a field service engineer from this list. For more information, see Siebel Assignment Manager Administration Guide.
• Appointment Booking System (ABS). Using the ABS, a customer service representative can schedule future appointments, with a choice of time periods from which a customer can select, and book appointments. The output of the ABS is the assignment of specific field service engineers to service activities on specific dates and times.
• Optimization Engine. The main purpose of the Optimization Engine, or Optimizer, is to reorganize and reassign a schedule to reduce the cost of the schedule. The optimizer uses a flexible set of constraints, availability, and cost considerations. For more information, see Cost Function.

  The Optimizer can reorganize schedules to meet contractual commitments for service, accommodate emergency service calls, and meet unforeseen events in the service organization (for example, sick days for field service engineers). These functions of the Optimizer are known as Contract Scheduling.

  Contract Scheduling inserts high-priority service activities into a schedule with minimal disruption of the schedule and without significant increase in the cost of the schedule. Contract scheduling requires an immediate response. For contract commitments, the Optimizer can either fit the service activity into a free spot in a schedule or reschedule and reoptimize an entire schedule to accommodate a new activity.

After an activity is assigned and scheduled, the Workflow Manager can notify a field service engineer by sending, for example, an email or a notification to a wireless device. The engineer can then synchronize a mobile PC or handheld computer to obtain details about an activity.

Best Practice: Wireless Updates

Schedules constantly change in a service region, because a service engineer calls in sick, a customer cancels an appointment, or a repair runs overtime. Service businesses must constantly shift to accommodate unexpected occurrences.

Wireless communications allow service forces to respond flexibly to change. For example, an engineer calls in sick. Using a solution provided by the ABS or Optimizer, Field Service can send out pages or Short Message Service (SMS) messages to cell phones to reschedule appointments. SMS can send messages up to 160 characters and request confirmation of message delivery.

In another example, when time is freed up unexpectedly, break/fix activities can be slotted into those times. The critical step is reaching the engineer, through a wireless device, and obtaining acceptance. The wireless device can also provide basic information about the customer and the problem, preparing the engineer to enter the customer site informed and to fix the problem without assistance from the service center.

If a job runs over the scheduled time, an engineer can use a wireless device to send a message to a dispatcher or customer service representative; the customer service representative can then proactively inform the customer of the process.

Best Practice: Integration with a Service Inventory System

Approximately 70 percent of all break/fix calls require a part. Because most break/fix calls occur during the day, service engineers may not have the parts in their trunk inventories or the time to pick up replacement parts from a local depot. One solution is to schedule a service engineer who has the parts on hand. This can be one of the constraints when choosing appropriate personnel.

Another solution, if the response can wait until the next day, is to reschedule the service call and drop-ship the parts overnight to the customer. Tight integration with the inventory system (which must track down to the trunk level) is critical to any scheduling system. Part utilization is set up using Scheduling Parameters.