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Service Regions

A service region is a geographic area defined by ZIP Codes and a service team. The ABS and the Optimization Engine deal with service regions and their associated data when scheduling activities. A field service engineer can belong to only one service region.

Defining Schedules for Service Regions

Every employee and service region has a predefined schedule that includes the days and hours that work may take place (normal work hours), plus exceptions that deviate from normal work hours. Schedules for service are defined in the Administration - Application screen, Schedules view. For more information about service schedules, see Defining Schedules for Service Regions.

A service region can have only one schedule. This schedule is associated with a service region in the Administration - Scheduling screen > Service Regions view.

The ABS uses the service region schedule and then the employees' schedules to provide appointment bookings. The Optimizer uses the field service engineers' schedules, not the service region schedule, when calculating the best deployment of personnel.

Setting schedules for field service engineers must follow these rules:

• A schedule must have only one shift start per day.
• The shift start must be the first time period in a day.

  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 possible to 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.