Immediate activity assignment

The Routing module can now prioritize activities and assign urgent ones to mobile workers immediately, even if it's at the cost of other activities. If the priority of the new activity is high enough, Routing can rearrange mobile workers' routes and insert urgent activities in front of other activities. This rearrangement happens even when the mobile worker is already on the way to an activity or in the middle of an activity.

Oracle Field Service Routing automatically assigns activities created in the bucket to resources matching the requirements of such activities. Depending on your company requirements, you can select a routing schedule that's the most suitable for a particular bucket. Routing can be started manually or once a day or recurrently with the specified interval. These options covered most of the operational patterns used by different companies. If the company preferred to distribute the workload the day before and provide its mobile workers with complete routes at the beginning of their working day, then once-a-day Routing is the best option. If the company needs to respond quickly to new tasks received during the day, then recurrent Routing running several times a day is the solution.

Routing schedule options have been enhanced to handle urgent activities. Routing can assign activities meeting certain criteria immediately after they're created in or moved to the bucket so that the time between the activity creation and its assignment is minimal. Routing now has an additional schedule option, immediate. Depending on the schedule settings, Routing either assigns urgent activities identified by the activity priority or assigns certain activities from the bucket keeping the time till assignment to the minimum.

Urgent and immediate activities with SLA end that have a preferred resource are assigned to preferred resources. If a preferred resource has the work day start after SLA end time and other resources are available to execute this activity, then the activity is assigned to the other resource. Further, if a preferred resource isn't available for an urgent activity assignment, the activity will be assigned to another resource with the matching work skills (and work zone based on the routing plan configuration).

Urgent routing doesn't assign activities to those mobile workers who just have on-call working calendars but their route isn't activated. Urgent routing assigns activities to those mobile workers who have on-call working calendars and their route is activated.

Note: Resources that have activated routes are considered eligible to be assigned activities, assuming all other conditions are met, even if they activated the route before their scheduled start time.

Here's the difference between an Immediate Routing plan for Urgent activities and activities meeting filter conditions--Immediate routing for urgent activities can reassign activities, whereas Immediate routing for activities that satisfy the filter conditions can't reassign.

Basic Principles of Immediate Activity Assignment

Immediate-assignment functionality is aimed at assigning certain activities immediately following their creation in or moving to the bucket. It serves the following purposes:

Assignment of activities with the minimum ETA possible. The activities to be assigned are determined by the Activity Priority settings.
Assignment of activities within the configured interval. The activities to be assigned are determined by applying a filter.
Support segmentable activity assignment when the Activity Type = segmentable activity flag is set.

Note: Segmentable activities aren't supported by urgent routing plans.
Segmentable activities are available for Immediate Routing when you create them and when you move them to the bucket.
Immediate routing of segmentable activities will use the required work skill ratio and not the preferred work skill ratio. This is different from regular activities.

Immediate Routing may not route those activities that are linked with hard constraints if they're assigned to the Bucket and linked before Immediate Routing triggers and starts the processing of such new Activities. Activities linked with other constraints will be routed via Immediate routing without any issues.

Start-start and finish-finish are considered hard constraints as one linked activity is assigned to a resource while another linked activity is in the bucket; this violates the constraint for an assigned activity.

Immediate Routing may still assign one of the linked activities (say activity A) in case if:

Activities linked to A are assigned to the mobile worker
Activity A is assigned in such a way that its links will not be violated (apart from other Routing's conditions) .

Note: Assigning simultaneous links isn't supported using Immediate Routing; such activities are skipped and unassigned.

Immediate Routing and SLA

Here's how Immediate Routing plans work with the SLA fields:

To minimize the chance of a resource to be retained on an activity that's nearing SLA End, Immediate Routing doesn't route activities (that satisfy the filter conditions) if the ETA is greater than the remainder of SLA End and SLA Window Threshold (that is, ETA > SLA End - SLA Window Threshold).
This automatically applies to activities for which SLA ends earlier than the SLA Window Threshold, before the current time. These activities can’t be routed by Immediate Routing, even if they satisfy the filter conditions.
If you try to assign activities manually in such a way that ETA > SLA End - SLA Window Threshold, it leads to the warning that the SLA Window may be lost.

You can configure the SLA Window Threshold using the Activity has not been completed XX minutes before the end of SLA Window setting on the Configuration > Display > Alerts section.

Resource Filters in Immediate and Urgent Routing

Immediate and urgent routing plans contain resource filters similar to Bulk Routing plans. The Filters section is similar to the Bulk Routing with the following exceptions.

To set resource filters:

Navigate to the Routing screen.
In the row for the Immediate or urgent routing plan, click the Properties icon and select Modify.
In the Edit Routing Plan screen for Urgent and Immediate routing plan, expand the Filters section, set the filters as needed. The Filters section is similar to the Bulk Routing with the following exceptions:
- Only one predefined filter is available for non-scheduled activities in the routing bucket.
- You can't add other filters or delete existing filters.
- You can't add/modify/delete activity filters.