Assign Activities to Temporary Resources

Normally routing considers activities from a given bucket and routes it down through the children in the hierarchical tree. However, there could be a situation where a resource must be temporarily assigned to work in an area, which is not part of the parent resource hierarchy. To handle such situations, routing can be configured to use resources from different parts of the resource tree.

To enable the feature, follow this process:

1. Select the Work zone support check box on the Business Rules screen.

2. Assign one (or more) work zones common with the routing bucket to the resource on the Resource work zones screen. You must assign the Work Zone to the resource, and not to the parent organization unit. Work Zones assigned to the parent Organization Unit (bucket or organization) will not be used for this purpose.

3. On the routing plan editor, open the Filters section and check the Use resources outside the routing bucket check box.

After you have followed the steps mentioned earlier, resources that are permanently located in the bucket and the resources that are temporarily assigned are treated equally while assigning activities. This is available for manual, once a day, recurrent or sequential routing plans. The Routing screen shows the number of resources available for the given bucket and routing plan. As with other routing plans, Routing takes into account the work skill levels, work zone ratios, work schedules, locations and all other parameters while routing activities for temporary resources.

Note: The assign activities to temporary resources feature is not available for immediate or urgent routing plans.

Suppose that you have enabled the Organizations option and you have more than one organization defined. In this case, the activities are routed to the temporary resource only if the resource's organization matches with either the bucket's organization or the organization of any bucket or organization unit down the hierarchical tree. Suppose that you run a routing plan simultaneously on two (or more) buckets, which could be at different levels, but share the same resources that are either temporarily assigned or present in the tree hierarchy. The subsequent plans are paused until the previous plans finish running. This might lead to a delay in displaying the routing run results.