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.