Workforce Scheduling Service Objective: Load Balancing

Available in: Lightning Experience

Available in: Enterprise and Unlimited Editions

Include this objective in a scheduling policy to control how much the scheduling engine prioritizes balancing workloads when evaluating service resources for appointments. Evenly distributing appointments improves resource productivity, reduces burnout, and helps maintain consistent service quality across your team.

During scheduling, the objective calculates each resource’s current utilization and prefers assigning new appointments to less-utilized resources. The engine measures utilization using one of two metrics, depending on how you configure the objective.

Total Appointment Duration

Measures utilization by the total time a resource spends on appointments within the calculation period. Use this metric when appointment lengths vary significantly and you want to balance the actual time commitment across resources.

Number of Appointments

Measures utilization by the count of appointments assigned to a resource within the calculation period. Use this metric when appointments are roughly equal in duration and you want to balance the volume of work across resources.

You also configure how often utilization is calculated.

• Daily: The engine calculates utilization across the current day.
• Monthly: The engine calculates utilization across the current calendar month. Use monthly frequency when workloads are planned over longer cycles and short-term fluctuations are acceptable.
• Weekly: The engine calculates utilization across the current calendar week. Use weekly frequency when workloads need to stay balanced on a shorter cycle, such as when resources have limited weekly availability.
• Custom: The engine calculates utilization for a specified custom duration. You can select from durations such as 3, 5, 10, or 15. Use these to tailor your workload utilization to meet your business needs.

For example, three service resources are available for a new appointment. Resource A has 20 hours of appointments scheduled this month, Resource B has 12 hours, and Resource C has 8 hours. When the Load Balancing objective is configured with Total Appointment Duration and Monthly frequency, the engine prefers Resource C because that resource has the lowest utilization for the current month.

If the objective is configured with Number of Appointments instead, the engine counts each resource’s appointments rather than total duration. In this case, a resource with fewer appointments is preferred, regardless of how long each appointment lasts.