We are having some troubles understanding some of the differences in the ABE and DSE and how it’s effecting our appointment booking. We typically request appointment’s via the ABE and then accept one of the offers and send it to the DSE. We are constantly finding that a lot of our appointment offers are being returned with available = false and that the reason code = 470. Digging through a ton of these appointments requests we have been trying to use the explainability service to better understand the WHY it was unavailable for any particular resource. We have been finding that for a good amount of our appointment requests they are showing as unavailable simply because of a plan value decrease. What we are looking to understand is what would cause an activity with a base value greater than 100 being added to the schedule that would cause the plan value to decrease? The required skills, amount of the time available in the shift, the max travel all point to the resource being capable and available to take on this job. And the SLA seems to indicate that it would be fine as well but the ABE/ DSE is showing that that particular SLA/ Resource combination would decrease the plan value and therefor it is not available to be scheduled. Is there somewhere we can tweak a value decrease that we as a business would find acceptable? Is there any way for the ABE to provide those kinds of details in the appointment offers?
+13
Hi George,
The value of the work is only one side of the equation. On the other side, you have the time spent by the engineer (both driving and working) as well as the actual cost/km (or mile) that needs to be taken into account. If those 2 costs are higher than the activity value (also taking into account multipliers, SLA slopes, etc.) the DSE may not want to schedule it at all as it’s simply not worth it.
Balancing the costs and values will require some testing and tweaking. I think there are a few options, depending on what system you are integrating with:
- Base value of activities
- SLAs and their slopes
- Costs per hour for engineers
- Costs per km/mile driven
- More advances features such as travel cost models, preferences, activity links, fixed activities, etc.
There is a lot of information on these topics in the Costs and Values and Appointment Booking Scheduling concept PDFs as well.
In general though, I would recommend to have the minimum value for the lowest priority activity as 1000 to prevent exactly the issue you’re facing at the moment. I would review and discuss the cost and value model for all types of work with your implementation partner / consultant and then test the updated model in a test/pre-prod environment.
Hope that helps.
Best regards,
Roel
+18
That’s hard to assess from the outside. You mention a value of 100 (btw., what’s the job duration?), but there are numerous cost factors that in total could exceed the base value.
- 100 is the max value, but depending on your SLA window and curve the actual value is likely less.
- Travel cost: How far would your resource need to travel and what’s the cost per km?
- Resource cost (in relation to the duration of your job)
- Shift cost
- Skill cost
- …
What you could try to do is increase the value to 1,000 and see if the activity gets scheduled then. If it’s still not, then look at your travel constraints (e.g., travel barriers or travel cost model). And once it is allocated, look at the SLA viewer to see what the allocation value is. This should give an idea if there are major cost factors involved.
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