• Organization's service policy: You must decide on what is the most important objective you are trying to achieve. A few examples of this are:

◦ Improving technician productivity

◦ Meeting SLA terms

◦ Minimizing drive time

◦ Minimizing overtime

• Number of work orders a technician can handle per day

• Number of technicians in the service organization

• Territory information: The number of service territories and how the service territories are set up must be decided. Service territories can be set up based on geographical boundaries or based on the product lines of the organization. The mode of travel in the territories must also be taken into consideration because the mode of travel impacts the scheduling. For example, drive times and travel costs might not be important factors during scheduling if the territories are walking territories.

• The list of countries to be serviced: Countries might have some specific requirements in terms of technician eligibility.

• Resource preference: It must be decided whether the resource preferences for the work orders are supported. Resource preferences include the option of specifying preferred, mandatory, and excluded technicians in work orders. This is significant because if a mandatory or excluded technician is specified in the work order, Schedule Optimization must fulfill this criterion while scheduling the work order.

• The volume of preventive maintenance work orders: The volume of PM work orders to be considered for scheduling must be taken into consideration.

• Dependency scheduling: It must be decided whether dependency scheduling is required. For more information, see Working with Dependency Scheduling.

• Business hours: How the business hours of the service organization are taken into consideration. For example, if the organization provides service 24/7, it must be ensured that the technicians' business hours are in line with it. The organization must also take factors such as shifts, holidays, and break hours into consideration.

• The number of products and product variations: The number of products and product variations in the organization must be taken into consideration.

• Booking fixed arrival windows: It must be decided whether booking fixed arrival windows for work orders is required. For more information, see Booking Fixed Arrival Window for the Work Order.

• Technician skill qualification: How stringently the organization follows the skill match for the work orders must be decided.