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Siebel Field Service Guide > Scheduling and Dispatch > Introduction to Siebel Scheduling >

Business Requirements

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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.

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 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.

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