Working in Real Time
If all goes well once a schedule is produced, everything will run according to plan. In the real world however things go wrong, engineers run late, emergency calls come in and new parts aren’t correct. Real-time dynamic scheduling comes into play when it would otherwise be impossible to keep on top of all of these changes and continue to deliver a cost-efficient schedule that meets the business’ requirements.
The data inputs required to maintain the optimal schedule come directly from the field, from the engineer’s own PDA, with status updates, such as first login, arrival on site, lack of a part, completing a job etc. All of these may affect the schedule and the 360 DSE calculates the schedule in real time in response to these inputs. The 360 DSE also incorporates manual updates such as an engineer’s estimate of the time taken to complete a job or automatic feeds such as GPS coordinates and traffic updates adjusting the schedules accordingly.
Optimal scheduling
Many service organizations send their engineers batches of jobs. However this makes the scheduling inefficient because if an engineer becomes available there might not be a job for him to do near his current location although there is a job nearby that has already been dispatched to another engineer. The best efficiencies can be achieved by delaying dispatch as long as possible to ensure that jobs go to the right engineer with the right skills at the right time.
This flexibility allows the service organization to strike the right balance between what is theoretically optimal and what is achievable in practice.