Create and Manage Service Objectives in Workforce Scheduling

Work rules decide who’s eligible for an appointment. Service objectives decide which eligible candidate is the best fit. When Workforce Scheduling finds more than one eligible candidate, it grades each option against the objectives on the active scheduling policy and picks the highest-graded option. When you add a service objective to a scheduling policy, you set the scheduling method for that objective. The scheduling method determines whether the objective applies to field scheduling, on-site scheduling, or both.

When the scheduling engine evaluates candidate schedules, it grades each candidate against every service objective on the active policy. The weight of each objective determines how much each objective influences the final score. Each objective has a scale that defines its best-case and worst-case values, and the engine grades each candidate across that scale.

The engine then multiplies each grade by the objective’s weight in the policy to produce a per-objective score, and sums the per-objective scores to produce the candidate’s total score. Weights are relative to the other objectives in the same policy — a higher weight tells the scheduling engine to prioritize that objective more. What matters is the ratio, not the number. The candidate with the highest total score wins.

Example: Suppose the Minimize Travel objective on a policy has a weight of 10. The objective’s scale runs from no travel time (best case, 100%) to 2 or more hours of added travel time (worst case, 0%). If a candidate schedule adds 1 hour of travel, the engine grades it at 50% on the Minimize Travel scale, then multiplies that grade by the weight of 10 to produce the candidate’s per-objective score for Minimize Travel. The engine repeats this for every objective on the policy, sums the per-objective scores, and compares totals across candidates.

You can also think of scoring as a penalty count: every grade below its best case adds penalty points weighted by the objective’s importance in the policy. For example, the penalty for scheduling an appointment with 2 hours of added travel time is higher than that for 1 hour of added travel time. The candidate with the fewest total penalty points wins. Maximizing total score and minimizing total penalty points are two views of the same calculation.

A scheduling policy can use one, several, or no service objectives. A policy with no objectives runs faster because the engine returns the first eligible candidate without grading options — the scheduling flow returns slots in time order rather than by grade.

To add a service objective to a scheduling policy, see Create and Manage Scheduling Policies in Workforce Scheduling. Follow these guidelines when you decide which objectives to add to a scheduling policy and how to weight them.

• Rank before weighting: Rank your objectives from most to least important before setting weights so the ratios accurately reflect your business priorities.
• Build incrementally: Start with a single objective. Add a second and adjust weights to tune the outcome before adding a third.
• Limit total objectives: Aim for two to four objectives per policy. More than four makes schedule results harder to analyze and rarely improves scheduling quality.

Workforce Scheduling includes standard service objectives that you can add to any scheduling policy.

Create a service objective when the standard objectives don’t cover a priority you need to enforce. Decide which standard objective type matches your business priority. Every custom objective inherits from one of these types, so choose the type first, then customize its settings.