Function: Service activity scheduling and dispatching

In this function, a service order is scheduled and dispatched. The individual engineers are assigned to the service orders in this planning process. To obtain maximum efficiency from the engineers' capacity, you can define several planning constraints, using either Service Scheduler or Service Scheduling Assistant . The planning can be transferred to the engineers' remote field service application.

The objective of this process is to schedule and dispatch service orders.

The planning for engineers and service orders is called service resource planning. During the first stage of the planning, the global resource planning, materials are reserved in a warehouse, or purchased, and the preferred engineers are provisionally scheduled against the orders. As a result of the global SRP, the order status changes from Free to Planned.

In the second stage, service orders are assigned to individual engineers, or a fixed team of engineers, or a flexible team of engineers. This can be done either manually or interactively using a Service Scheduler or by means of a tool, such as Service Scheduler Assistant (SSA).

For the best use of engineer capacity, you can define several planning constraints, for example, engineer working hours, preferred engineer, skills required, object availability, and response times. As a result of the batch process (SRP), the order status changes from Planned to Released. At a central level, the scheduler has a graphical planning board with all outstanding orders. You can either manually change the planning or use a drag-and-drop procedure to move the planning from one engineer to another, or reallocate further in time. The user can also perform the planning intelligently by using a tool such as the Service Scheduler Assistant, which can plan the best engineer per order, or best order per engineer, or assign a group of engineers to a selected set of orders under the selected constraints.

The planning can be transferred to the engineer's remote field service application, so that engineers can see their own daily planning. If the planning is changed, service engineers can be informed about their next order through remote access.