Scheduling Management
Always the right person for the right order
SERVICE 1 Scheduling Management – plans field engineer appointments automatically and optimizes their tours at the same time.
SERVICE 1 Scheduling Management
Scheduling Management is the central, pivotal element of SERVICE 1. The module controls automatic appointment planning for field engineers while simultaneously optimizing their tours. Dispatchers simply use a planning board to control field engineer appointments. Anyone involved in the service process, such as Call Centre agents or the customers themselves, can also book engineer appointments autonomously.
Scheduling is fun with SERVICE 1.
Intelligent capacity planning
Besides operational control, this module also gives dispatchers other useful tools for optimizing engineer capacity. Capacity planning enables the short-, medium- and long-term control of individual engineers or entire teams – regardless of whether they are deployed for maintenance tasks or are kept as reserve capacity for urgent unforeseen repairs.
The advantages of the module
- Customers’ wishes are considered when fixing appointments, thus increasing customer satisfaction
- Planning is more realistic, making it easier to keep agreed appointments
- Reduced time and effort needed for appointment scheduling and capacity planning
- Reduced journey times and shorter tours increase engineer productivity
Perfect user interfaces
The graphic interface in Scheduling Management is the planning board. Everything revolves around the Gantt Chart, which displays order scheduling in an easy-to-read way by visualizing appointment-relevant parameters such as the Service Order itself and the corresponding journey and break times. Other influential variables such as training, sickness or vacation are also displayed. New orders are scheduled either semi- or fully automatically with the help of the Advanced Scheduling Engine (ASE for short). In addition, it is easy for dispatchers to use software assistants to reschedule appointments – for example, if engineers are absent due to sickness or new high-priority orders need to be scheduled.
Appointment allocation that suits
Scheduling Management is responsible for the automatic, optimized allocation of service appointments. The aim of this feature is always to find the best possible alternative for order fulfillment. It does this by running a fully automatic check of the required qualifications for the respective job, the spare parts available and fulfillment times. It then determines the appropriate engineer resources that are available. The possible alternatives are calculated with due consideration of the frequently contradictory scheduling priorities; these could be short journey and response times or an even utilization of all engineer capacities.
Scheduling Management can be flexibly integrated into various modules, which enables all parties to fix appointments autonomously: dispatchers and Call Centre agents use the Service Console, while customers use the Self-Service feature.
Optimized route planning
The planned routes for all engineers are checked automatically several times a day and whenever a new appointment is arranged. If the system ascertains that better routes are possible because the order situation has changed, the routes concerned are optimized automatically. When this happens, service orders are switched from one engineer to another or rearranged in a different chronological order.
