Maintaining Employee Schedules and Exceptions

A business administrator associates a schedule (available and unavailable hours) with an employee in the Service Details view in the Employees view of the Administration - User screen. In the Schedules view of the Administration - Service screen, you can define the schedules that appear in the Schedule field. Any updates to schedules are updated in Oracle Field Service.

As a prerequisite of this integration, an OFS admin user will have to create a work-schedule as an OFS calendar configuration with the same name as the Siebel schedule name. As part of the employee data transfer workflow, Siebel will share the schedule name associated with the employee and it will be updated as a schedule in the OFS resource's calendar. In cases where there is no matching schedule in OFS that corresponds to the Siebel schedule, a resource will be created in OFS without a schedule and an error message will be updated in Siebel.

A business administrator also maintains employee exception hours for the employee in the Employee Exception Hours view in the Employees view of the Administration - User screen.

Exceptions represent special non-working days or working days. Different exception records can define exceptions for different sites, for example, U.S. holidays for a site and Canadian holidays for another site. You can define a day or continuous blocks of days as an exception to a schedule. In some cases, exception hours can define non-working periods, for example, no work on Sundays from 6:00 A.M. to 12:00 A.M. in a 7x12 schedule. In other cases, exception hours can define work periods on days that are not normal work days, for example, Saturday mornings in a 5x8 schedule.

To associate an exception with a schedule, define the exception and include this exception in the definition of a schedule. Employee Exception Hours with a Working flag set to false is considered as a period of unavailability in Oracle Field Service. In Oracle Field Service, each such exception will have a name, start and end date and a working flag which is defaulted to false.

If the employee in Siebel contains any working exception hours (e.g. meetings, trainings), an internal activity will be created during this period so that the field technician's availability can be updated accordingly.