Dispatch Field Activities Automatically

For large volumes of field activities, it can be useful for the dispatching and extraction of field activities and field orders to be automated.

Dispatching refers to the processes of grouping field activities into related groups by premise and date, etc. The automatic dispatch job ( FOD ) selects all pending field activities that:

• are not yet connected yet to a FO,
• have a dispatch group,
• are linked to dispatchable FA Type
• have a schedule date <= today's date + a specified dispatch ahead days AND have a priority = a specified priority (if specified).

The selected field activities are grouped by premise, dispatch group (or alternate dispatch group from the dispatch group table), and date. A field order is created and the grouped field activities are linked to it. The field order will be dispatched on the designated date.

For example, imagine the following field activities:

For this set of field activities, the process will group FA 1 and FA 2 based on GSR1, FA 3 and FA 4 based on TM2 and FA 5 will have its own FO.

The rules are:

• Look at the primary dispatch group and try to find a match in the primary or alternate for the other field activities.
• If no match is found, look at the alternate dispatch group and try and match with the primary or alternate for the other field activities.
• If no match is found after step 1 and 2, a separate field order must be created.