Siebel Field Service Guide > Scheduling Using Siebel Scheduler >

About Siebel Scheduler

Dispatchers, who review and manually rearrange region schedules, and service center representatives, who answer the customer calls and make appointments for service activities, can assign and schedule personnel to complete service activities. Also, automated process (for example, workflows) can identify activities and perform automatic scheduling.

The process of scheduling field service engineers must consider a wide range of factors, including availability of personnel, proximity of service engineers to the customer site, skills of service engineers, availability of parts, efficiency of scheduling, and optimization of costs for the service provider.

Siebel Field Service includes the following features for assigning and scheduling activities:

• Manual assignment. Manual assignment is available in any Activities view, where a dispatcher or customer service representative can enter data in the Employees field. For more information, see Assigning Activities to Field Service Engineers (End User).
• Dispatch Board. This screen lets a dispatcher or customer service representative manually assign and schedule individual activities by dragging and dropping the activities to a Gantt chart. For more information, see Dispatch Board.
• Assignment Manager. Assignment Manager provides a list of personnel who are qualified to complete a service activity or service request. The list, based on a set of rules, is ranked by a score that indicates the suitability of the engineer. The dispatcher or customer service representative selects 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 using a choice of time periods that a customer can select, and book appointments. The ABS assigns specific field service engineers to service activities on specific dates and times. For more information, see About the Appointment Booking System.
• Optimizer. The main purpose of the Optimizer (or Optimization Engine) is to reorganize and reassign a schedule to reduce the cost of the schedule. The Optimizer uses a flexible set of constraints, availability information, and cost considerations. For more information, see Defining Cost Functions for the Optimizer.

  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 Contract Scheduling.

  Contract Scheduling inserts high-priority service activities into a schedule with minimal disruption to the schedule and without a significant increase in the cost of the schedule. Contract Scheduling requires an immediate response. For contractual commitments, the Optimizer can fit the service activity into an available time slot in a schedule or reschedule and reoptimize an entire schedule to accommodate a new activity. For more information, see About the Schedule Optimizer.

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

Business Requirements for Schedules

Typically, businesses that schedule personnel have the following needs:

• Match the appropriate employee to an activity. (For example, the employee with the appropriate skills must complete the activity.)
• Minimize the cost of service. (For example, minimize overtime, down time, and travel.)
• Consider contractual commitments. (For example, a contract might indicate that service personnel must arrive onsite within 24 hours.)

Businesses schedule service for the following time spans:

• Emergencies today. Make sure that the best person can respond in the promised time frame.
• Activities that occur over the next 2 weeks. Make sure that the appropriate employees are efficiently utilized and not spending excess time traveling from site to site.
• The weeks and months ahead. Book future activities, such as preventive maintenance and installations, using available resources efficiently.