Booking Emergency and Contract-Based Appointments

Sometimes you might want to request and fulfill immediate or urgent appointments. For example, you might schedule some appointments because of an emergency or because of contractual obligations involving service-level agreements.

Oracle Field Service can evaluate such considerations and book an appointment for the customer. The customer service representative requests the appointment by clicking the Insert Activity button for the activity. (This button is available in the Schedule view in the Activity List view of the Activities screen.)

In this type of scheduling, no slots are returned to the customer service representative. The appointment is booked automatically by using the activity settings that the representative designates. An activity is inserted into the Oracle Field Service. The customer service representative can select the Lock Schedule or Lock Assignment or both depending on the specific customer requirement.

In a scenario where the Oracle Field Service is not able to find an available slot, the activity gets assigned at the bucket level and is not scheduled. The dispatcher will have to manually schedule this using the Oracle Field Service Dispatch board by rescheduling other lower priority appointments.

For example, a service-level agreement for a customer stipulates that a booked appointment start within an hour after calling. The customer service representative can use the contract scheduling functionality to create an appointment that might not otherwise be easily fulfilled.