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Defining Schedules and Availability for Employees

The Schedule field in the Service Details view in the Employees view of the Administration - User screen and the exception records in the Employee Exception Hours view in the Employees view of the Administration - User screen determine employee schedules (available and unavailable hours). In the Schedules view of the Administration - Service screen, you set the definition of the schedules that appear in the Schedule field.

The ABS uses the service region schedule as a base, and then refines time slot choices by using the employee schedules. For more information, see Defining Schedule Hours.

The Optimizer uses only the employee schedules.

To define schedules and availability for employees, perform the following procedures:

• Defining Hours for Employees
• Specifying Employees as Unavailable

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

Rules for Defining Employee Schedules

When setting schedules for field service engineers, note with the following rules:

• A schedule must have only 1 shift start for each day.

  To set up multiple shift start times, use multiple schedules, each for a separate shift.

• You must select the Shift Start Flag field for the first time period in a day (except when a shift spans 2 days).

  If a shift spans more than 1 day (for example, Monday 9:00 P.M. to 11:59 P.M. and Tuesday 12:00 A.M. to 4:00 A.M.), then the first day must include the start of the shift.

• The ABS, but not the Optimizer, can have activities that span more than 1 day.
• It is recommended that you assign no more than 150 employees to each service region, especially if you use optimization.
• You can schedule 1 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 these breaks as working time. Consequently, inaccuracies appear in cost calculations.