Business Context
Some businesses manage work orders that require multiple visits to customer's site by one or more technicians, over several days or weeks or even months. Examples of such service jobs include installation of complex / large industrial systems comprising multiple machines and maintenance of huge interconnected machinery. From a scheduling standpoint, these jobs have technicians travelling to a customer's site (which can mean a different city, out in the sea, or remote locations), and visiting the actual location of the installed products every day for the execution of work.
These visits have to be scheduled taking into account various impacting factors as follows:
• The hours during which technicians get access to the installed products for servicing; these depend on the nature, criticality, and usage of the installed systems
• Technicians' working hours, to ensure realistic work schedules
• Avoiding overlap with any other jobs or events scheduled on the technicians' calendars during the long job date range
• Ensuring scheduling of reasonably long enough events, so that events added to gaps in technician's calendar are worth the truck-roll
• Desirability and necessity of scheduling the multiple visits as contiguously as possible, so that the job gets done efficiently for customers and any down time is minimized
• The ability to treat the set of visits as a single logical unit, so that any schedule updates do not affect the overall job execution or constraints
The existing Dispatch Console features related to Work Order scheduling do not lend themselves to meeting all of the above complex scheduling requirements.
For example, while technician's business hours are enforced when creating/editing single events, they are not applied when multiple events are created in bulk using Manage Multiple Assignments dialog box. If a single event spanning multiple days were to be created for the entire duration of the long job, it cannot capture individual job-site visit details, weekends, and other holidays. Even with Manage Multiple Assignments, dispatcher is required to manually define individual schedules, which are then created in one shot on save.
The Long Job Scheduling (LJS) feature along with Job Duration Management (JDM) functionality, handles these complex scheduling requirements for long duration jobs. This feature has been built in such a way that it can intelligently schedule jobs that are longer than a technician day, considering all the configured constraints, by auto-creating multiple events for a technician, over the long job duration. The constraints applied include technician working hours, machine access hours, avoiding overlap of existing events on the technician's calendar, and minimum amount of time to allocate for each visit. Also, it tracks various aspects of service duration such as original estimate, scheduled duration, unscheduled duration, and revisions to duration due to service scope change / estimate variance. These are applied when LJS events are created, edited, or deleted.