Dynamic Scheduling Services
The allocation of service resources frequently involves reconciling potentially competing objectives. Planned work needs to be balanced with reactive, time-critical tasks. Efficiency needs to be balanced with the need to meet demanding SLAs and comply with legislation. The inevitability of change means that plans may need to be re-prioritised at a moment’s notice.
Manual scheduling systems are labour intensive and struggle to optimise resources in a fast-changing environment. Early attempts to automate the process typically involved batch mode, start-of-day scheduling that struggled to adapt to changing circumstances, and as a result locked organisations in to inefficient patterns of work.
Cognito has considerable experience of integrating with existing third party scheduling and job management systems, and can offer significant benefits in such environments, but the Service Delivery Platform also offers a powerful alternative in the form of integrated dynamic scheduling services.
Dynamic scheduling is particularly effective in fast-changing service environments that include a significant percentage of time-critical reactive work that is triggered by changes in the customer's circumstances - such as fault with a business-critical piece of equipment.
In these time-critical environments, priorities can change throughout the day. As they do, organisations need to have clear visibility of the location, availability and status of all available assets - and be able to make immediate decisions about which resource is best placed to take on the job.
Needless to say, optimising these decisions involves highly complex calculations that embrace all the key business rules that inevitably drive your service operations. Choosing the right software is only one part of solving the problem.
Better Rules result in Better Schedules
The scheduling system needs to embrace the often subtle business rules that result in an optimal balance of effective resource utilisation and customer satisfaction. Factors such as details of the customer's SLA, the mobile worker's skill sets, the availability of parts and the location of qualified resources all play a part.
The Cognito Method recognises the critical importance of capturing these frequently complex and often incompletely documented considerations and embedding them into the scheduling engine. These rules are then applied in real time to ensure that resources are always utilised in a manner which best achieves the service organisation's objectives.
The benefits of such an approach can be profound. Work patterns and schedules can evolve dynamically throughout the day to reflect changing circumstance and priorities. Engineer utilisation, SLA compliance, customer satisfaction and return on assets employed are amongst the factors that are positively affected - resulting in a remarkably short typical payback period.
