Repairs and Schedules

Most service businesses start the day with a schedule of activities to perform, such as maintenance, installations, and other scheduled repairs. During the day, customers can call for repairs that require modification of schedules.

Customers with service agreements often have specific entitlements with a required response time. This response time might be tiered according to the agreement. Standard agreements might specify that engineers are onsite within 24 hours of the service call, and premium agreements might specify response times as short as 2 hours.

You must insert repair activities into the schedule that the Optimizer carefully optimized during the previous night. Optimizing the schedule again is usually not practical because optimization routines can run for hours to determine good solutions. Customers want a service commitment immediately, often while they are on the phone. You must achieve a balance between trading optimized schedules for quick responses and customer satisfaction while still enforcing business requirements.

When responding to service requests, the ideal solution for the customer service representatives is to click a button and receive a time for a service call that considers contractual agreements and other constraints. The Optimizer addresses this need.