Set Up Field Service Scheduling and Optimization Features

Before you get started, find a full list of features in What’s Available in Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization.

• Field Service Scheduling and Optimization Services
  Scheduling and optimization includes services used to schedule, reschedule, and unschedule service appointments.
• Set Up Sliding and Reshuffling for Scheduling and Appointment Booking
  Free up time for scheduling more appointments when using Field Service appointment booking and scheduling. With sliding, service appointments on the Gantt can move to an earlier or later time, within the resource’s availability for the same shift. By using reshuffling and sliding together, service appointments on the Gantt can also move to a different day or to a different resource. Reshuffling and sliding service appointments provide more time slot availability and faster SLA compliance and enable the scheduling of longer service appointments by reducing white spaces.
• Set Up Travel Modes
  Optimization services with different travel modes enhance predictive travel by providing more accurate travel time predictions and improving the completion rate of service appointments. By leveraging different types of travel modes, admins define the travel mode per territory, per primary service territory member, or both, to reflect transportation type (car, light truck, heavy truck, bicycle, or walking), the use of toll roads, and hazmat considerations.
• Configure Travel Time Buffers
  Add a buffer to travel time to account for additional travel-related activities such as parking, security checks, on-site navigation to better schedule your workforce. Configure travel time buffers at the org, service territory, or individual service appointment level to improve the precision of your scheduling operations.
• Prioritize Field Service Appointments for Optimization
  When your team’s availability is limited, prioritize critical service appointments over less pressing work. You can assign dynamic priorities, such as values that increase as due dates approach. Optimization can consider priority values when it schedules appointments to time slots.
• Create Relevance Groups
  Use relevance groups to apply work rules and service objectives to certain groups of appointments or service territory members. You can apply different logic based on types of work and service resources within one scheduling policy. For example, use relevance groups to enforce your company policy on breaks and travel time for full-time versus part-time employees. Relevance groups can also use data insights from across your Salesforce org to improve scheduling. For example, use relevance groups to prioritize technicians with specific skills for high-priority accounts, or assign resources based on asset criticality or customer sentiment.
• Manage Field Service Scheduling Overlaps
  To fix scheduling overlaps in Field Service, where one appointment overlaps with another appointment or an absence, use any of several available methods.
• Fix Overlaps with an Automated Scheduling Flow
  Tackle Field Service scheduling challenges with an automated flow that addresses and fixes schedule overlaps that occur due to an appointment ending late. Use the flow template recommendations or adjust the template to suit your specific use case. Fix Schedule Overlaps flow is available only when you're using Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization.
• Create Scheduling Recipes for Common Events
  Tackle common Field Service scheduling challenges with simple optimization “recipes” that address what happens to your schedule after appointment cancellations, time changes, and overlaps. Cover all scenarios by creating multiple recipes for each category.
• Manage Optimization Conflicts
  Enhance operational stability and reduce your optimization partial completion rate by preventing optimization conflicts when multiple optimization requests are made simultaneously on the same dataset. For example, prevent two users from creating optimization requests simultaneously for the same territory and horizon. Also configure what happens when schedule changes are made while optimization is running, for example, if a new job is automatically scheduled or a dispatcher reschedules a job while optimization is running.
• Reserve Time Slots for Designated Types of Work
  Create specific time slots in Field Service dedicated to service appointments that meet your criteria.
• Enable Multiday Field Service Appointments
  Some Field Service industries have service appointments that span multiple days, for example, utility infrastructure repairs and installations. With multiday service appointments you can schedule service appointments that span resources' nonavailability without rule violations.
• Manage Work Capacity in Field Service
  Control the work performed by your workforce according to dynamic company priorities. 
• Set Up Optimization of Large Field Service Datasets with Dynamic Scaling
  Manage large-scale global and in-day optimization effectively without splitting data due to system limits. Dynamic scaling intelligently structures data into logical clusters, seamlessly balancing demand and capacity while accounting for operational work rule constraints. This capability simplifies optimization management by enabling higher system limits, so you can optimize your entire dataset in one smooth operation. You don’t need to manually define optimization groups and boundaries. Dynamic scaling unifies and streamlines the optimization process, creating a single, cohesive solution that prevents conflicts and overlaps. Dynamic scaling is available only when you’re using Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization.