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How Does the Field Service Optimization Engine Work?
Need a few contractors onsite a week from now and need to know who’s available? Absolutely have to have a specialist arrive to a service location in an hour? What about a regularly scheduled appointment for both the contractors and the specialist to service the same location?
Why You Should Optimize
These tasks can be simple to schedule individually. Manually constructing an efficient schedule for collective tasks can be a nightmare even for an expert administrator!
The good news is that you can let Field Service’s optimization engine do the work for you. By generating an optimal schedule for your team and customers, according to your priorities and constraints, schedule optimization helps you comply with service-level agreements and minimize travel time, overtime, costs, and no-shows.
How is this done? For a given time horizon, optimization grades assignments based on service objectives in the scheduling policy, and compares overall scores for different schedule iterations. When the optimization is completed, it chooses the schedule with the highest score, and assigns appointments accordingly.
It’s important to prepare for the inevitability of scale. Scale in customer calls, scale in resource appointments, scale in travel time and even overtime expense.
Schedules and availability are key to assigning resources, tracking projects, and ensuring customer satisfaction. The optimization engine considers all of the available resources and appointment times and uses the scheduling policies that you set to find the most qualified candidate and time slot based on your service objectives. Scheduled service appointments that have already started (Scheduled Start time is in the past) are considered by the optimizer as pinned and aren't moved or unscheduled. The service appointment's travel time can be updated since the next service appointment can be updated.
Optimization Process
- The optimization engine receives all the relevant service appointment, service territory, and service resource data for the given time horizon.
- The appointments are then ordered according to priority, and evaluated accordingly. The priority is defined using the Work Order Priority Field, Work Order Line Item Priority Field, and Service Appointment Priority Field options in Field Service Settings. Then it starts to evaluate the highest priority appointment first.
- The optimization engine then compares the prioritized appointment's details, such as territory, required skills, and due date, to the scheduling policy’s work rules.
- Work rules help filter out unqualified or unavailable candidates.
- It views the scheduling policy’s work rules. Work rules remove candidates who can’t complete the appointment because they're unqualified or unavailable. Now it has a pool of candidates who are ready and able to do the job.
- The optimization engine searches for available time slots between a service appointment’s earliest start permitted and due date (or arrival window start and end dates if they’re available) within the time horizon.
- Each available time slot and qualified candidate is then evaluated according to the scheduling policy’s service objectives.
- This process is then repeated for remaining slots and candidates, adds the scores, and assigns the appointment to the candidate and time slot with the highest score.
The optimizer continues to the next appointment on the list (ordered by priority) and repeats the process. When all service appointments sent to optimization are scheduled on the Gantt, or the Gantt is full, the schedule receives an overall Utilization grade.
