Handling Unoptimizable Routes
Schedule Optimization perceives the technician route as unoptimizable if the dispatcher manually schedules or reschedules a work order or a non-work order event to a technician in a way that is impossible to achieve. Schedule Optimization does not schedule any more work orders for that technician on that day. If there are optimizable scheduled work orders in the technician route for the day, Schedule Optimization reschedules those work orders to a different technician on the same day or moves those work orders to a later date.
Consider the following example scenarios:
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Scenario
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Result
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• The dispatcher schedules a work order manually for a technician at 8.30 AM.
• The drive time between the technician’s home location and the work order location is 1.5 hours.
• Technician’s business hours start at 8 AM.
• Schedule Optimization has scheduled two work orders for the technician later in the day.
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The technician cannot reach the work order location at 8.30 AM. So, Schedule Optimization marks the technician route as unoptimizable and reschedules the optimizable work orders scheduled for the technician for the day.
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• The dispatcher has manually scheduled a work order for the technician for the 9 AM -10 AM slot.
• The Technician record is updated and working hours are removed.
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All the work orders assigned to the technician are unassigned. Schedule Optimization marks the technician route as unoptimizable and reschedules the optimizable work orders in the technician route.
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• The technician route has a PTO/ non-work order event, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM.
• Dispatcher placed an overlap event with PTO/non-work order event, from 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM.
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The technician route is marked unoptimizable.
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• The technician route has a manually scheduled work order (pillar), from 10.00 AM to 11:00 AM.
• The dispatcher placed another work order manually, from 10:30 AM -11:30 AM.
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The technician route is marked unoptimizable.
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The dispatcher must manually handle the technician’s schedule for the day if a technician's route is marked unoptimizable by Schedule Optimization. If the dispatcher rectifies the route by removing or adjusting the event that caused the route to be unoptimizable, Schedule Optimization perceives the route as optimizable again.
Also, consider the following points when you handle unoptimizable routes:
• Travel Times: When Schedule Optimization creates a technician route, the travel times for all the events in the route are calculated. If the dispatcher updates any event in the route manually, and that results in the route being marked unoptimizable, the dispatcher must handle the travel times for that event. On the other hand, if there is a manual update in one of the events in the route and Schedule Optimization is still trying to accommodate that updated event in the route, Schedule Optimization might update the travel times for the event, to best accommodate the event in the route.
• Business Hours: Updating the technician business hours for the current day, for which the technician route has already been created, is not supported. Doing so might cause the route to be unoptimizable.
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Schedule Optimization uses the AllowUnreachablePillars flag to configure the behavior of marking routes as unoptimizable in the scenario of invalid scheduling by dispatchers. The flag is set to true by default. Contact the Schedule Optimization team to set the flag to false, which means that Schedule Optimization never marks any route as unoptimizable and routes always stay active. Setting the AllowUnreachablePillars flag to false causes event overlaps and other discrepancies when there is invalid scheduling by the dispatcher. The discrepancies should be handled by the dispatcher manually.
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