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Defining Service Regions

A service region is a grouping of field service engineers in a geographical area for a purpose, such as supporting a certain set of products. Service managers try to manage the load in a service region by balancing proactive calls (installations and preventive or scheduled maintenance) with reactive calls. Service regions ease the administrative burden by allowing service managers to set consistent schedules, constraints, and costs for a large number of employees. For information about defining service regions using Siebel Field Service Integration to Oracle Real-Time Scheduler, see Administering Service Regions.

Also, a service region is a grouping of field service engineers and the activities that they perform. Thus, Siebel Scheduler creates a bounded solution set with a finite solution space and a finite number of activities to schedule. An assumption for a service region is that 2 employees with the same skill set are both capable of performing an activity. For an application that deals with only employees, employees are not grouped together well, and the interchangeability rules are too vague to effectively determine.

Every employee and service region has a predefined schedule that includes the days and hours that work can occur (normal work hours) and exceptions that deviate from normal work hours.

To define a service region, perform the following procedures:

1. Create a service region record. For more information, see Creating Service Regions.
2. Associate a schedule with the service region. For more information, see Associating Schedules with Service Regions.
3. Specify any regions that function as parent service regions. For more information, see Specifying Parent Service Regions.
4. Define the geographic area of the service region. For more information, see Defining Geographic Areas for the Optimizer.

This task is a step in Process of Administering Schedules Using Siebel Scheduler.

Caches for Service Regions

The information relating to each service region (for example, the employees assigned to the service region) is cached in memory. Instead of allowing the ABS and the Optimizer to operate directly on the Siebel database, the server copies data from the Siebel database into memory caches for the ABS and for the Optimizer. The ABS cache holds the time slots in the future, and the Optimizer cache holds the activities occurring in the next few days. This approach allows for quick and efficient scheduling and reduces traffic and the CPU load for the Siebel database.

Each service region has its own cache so that Siebel Scheduler processes occur independently. You can run Siebel Scheduler on separate CPUs in 1 server or separate servers as required. The ABS and the Optimizer are also multithreaded, and each service region can accept multiple requests at the same time. For more information, see Reloading the ABS and Optimizer Caches and About Loading and Reloading Data for Service Regions.