Hi @AXCPRAVEW,

This is something we have done for our solution, by having resources who work out a Centre along side resources who operate on a mobile basis.

We have a 3rd party solution for address lookup and part of that service we maintain a list of locations. From this we can then compare customer location to our locations, and offer a site for them to bring their vehicle to us based on distance.

From an ABE perspective we needed to ensure only the resources we wanted to stay at the centre got those tasks, allowing the other resources out on their vans. Might be a better solution to this, but we have a business rule that puts a Part Need (which has a skill) against on the task. This ensures the resources match when offering appointments.

After that the resources are set with a Max Travel of 1 minute. That’s just incase there’s some minor differences in the geo locations.

This gives us the ability to have resources who can travel and give a mobile appointment, then resources who operate from one location. 
 

I hope that makes sense.

Regards Ady

Also, I have just re-read this part again.

Appointments window in FSM should show

• Grouped by Distance from Customer Location by Dealer Centre by Available booking slots.

This would be interesting, as effectively you could be searching multiple locations at the same time. I am not sure if that’s possible.

So apologies if my initial answer doesn’t help.

Ady

Hi @AXCPRAVEW,

I re-read the initial post and this bit again.

Appointments window in FSM should show

• Grouped by Distance from Customer Location by Dealer Centre by Available booking slots.

This requirement is different from our standard PSO Appointment booking process and We wanted to know if PSO still can be used to cater this.

 So apologies if my initial reply misses the mark.

I am now interested to know if multiple locations can be catered for through one ABE request. That would be a good benefit to our process.

Ady

Hi,

From the PSO side I think you would need something in FSM to determine which dealers are near to a given customer and sort them be distance. This should be fairly simple if you use straight line distance and it would also be possible to request the HTM estimated distance from PSO is necessary.

Once you have this you could potentially send an appointment request for each dealer you wish to consider into PSO, and the appointment booking engine could then tell you which slots are available. If this is a very simple problem you may not need to use PSO for it however.

Hope this helps,

Paul

@Paul Smith 

Sorry to hijack @AXCPRAVEW question (hopefully this helps). But I think we’d be interested in the same outcome.

This is a screen grab of a our online solution to get an appointment for one of our centres.

On the page we use our address provider for the customer location and then show the distances from their location to nearest stores.

If I wanted to check location 1, then location 2 they would have to be one at a time. Are you saying we could effectively send in three separate ABE requests and it would return 3 different outcomes based on the locations passed for the one activity?

Ady

I guess it would be best to use 3 ‘placeholder’ activities, one at each location, but yes you could in that case send all 3 requests at once. I’d advise using the ‘non-blocking’ appointment booking option to avoid blocking out time at each centre unnecessarily.