Group Planning

The purpose of Group Planning functionality is to assign a service engineer to a service order or a service department to a work order/planned activity. Group planning prepares groups which are containers of work, that can be assigned to a resource.

Group Planning can be used for time-based planning or route-based planning. When a route is planned for group planning activities, travel distances and travel times are calculated for activities. The route can influence the sequence in which the activities are executed. After planning a route, the route planning data is copied from group planning to the original service order activity, when the plan is released from group planning.

The allocation of resources to planned groups and activity sets is the last step in the Group Planning process. Resources can be service engineers or service departments. The allocation of resources can be executed manually, semi-automatically, (wherein LN proposes the resource and the user selects the resource manually), or automatically. The allocation can be based on skills, and/or planning attributes.

For group planning, workload leveling is used to define the number of groups that must be generated for a combination of planning attributes scheduled in parallel. Workload leveling creates multiple groups for one combination of these attributes. For schedule-based workload leveling, the planned start and finish times of the activities are used to distribute the activities across the groups in a group set.

Handling slack is part of the workload leveling process. Slack may occur after adding an activity to a group. When the Respect Earliest Start Time check boxes are selected for service order, work order and planned activities in the Service Planning Parameters (tsspc0100m000) session, an activity cannot be started before the earliest start time. Effectively, slack may occur after adding the activity to a group.

Workload leveling can be performed at the time of creating a new plan. The leveling is performed directly after the activities are loaded. With or without workload leveling, the parallel planning attributes define the groups that are created when a new plan is created. However, without workload leveling, only one group is created for each unique combination of parallel attribute values. With workload leveling, a group set and a group are created for each unique combination of parallel attribute values.

For time-based workload leveling, the planned start and finish times of the activities are used to distribute the activities across the groups within a set of groups.

When the workload leveling is executed geographically, the engine calculates the length of the route, for each group. The objective of dividing the work based on geographical area, is to divide the map first in geographical 'clusters' and later schedule or route plan within the cluster. When the sequence of the time schedule is respected by route planning, the Time Schedule based and Route Based planning is not applicable. The route planning therefore continues in a 'keep sequence' mode. The distance between the activities is calculated by the route planning routine, but the sequence is NOT optimized to minimize the distance.

The re-work load leveling functionality is implemented only when one set of attributes are selected. For example, the user selects one group with reference point, Essen and skill Support. The engine checks for non frozen groups with the same characteristics. If present, the number of non frozen groups leads to the default number of groups, as output. The number of groups input must equals the number of groups output. However, this is not mandatory. The number of parallel groups can be increased or decreased. A part of the group can be firm planned (as some part of the group is already completed). The system levels the work load from the firm planned point onwards, in the group.

The existing groups are executed in a specific region and in the region, the planner aims to achieve the highest possible match to the times agreed with the customer. However, the engineer is already driving in a specific area and must stay there as much as possible to avoid the travel. The area in which the service engineer is working, is marked by the Center of Gravity of the cluster calculation. This point is the average GPS longitude and latitude of the activities in the group, represented by the blue dots on the map. In the selected areas, routes are calculated according to the route planning algorithm. Since the plan is already in execution, generating a new plan is not considered, represented by the 'check' marks in the picture on the right. The next activity is already frozen because the engineer has started working on the activity.