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Hi,

Historically we have had FSM and PSO and all data initialised into PSO each day for scheduling.
FSM has always been the master for the data in terms of Rosters, Shifts, Resources, Calendar Exceptions etc.


Our Resource Planning Team work 100% in FSM. This does give us some restrictions.

 

I started to look at ARP in PSO (early 2020) and could see straight-away this would give us some massive benefits to how we operate and manage resources. 
Unfortunately some pandemic came along and objectives / priorities were changed. However this is something I want to revisit.

 

I am therefore asking the community if any customers have made the jump from FSM nightly 'INITs' to ARP for managing resources?
If so is there anything that can be shared in terms of steps to setting up ARP.
Things like migrating current work calendar's and rosters reducing set-up time for cutover.
How to manage updates in ARP i.e. calendar exceptions, shift data, and feed that back into FSM. We have our dispatch teams working solely in FSM too, so anything changing in ARP would need to be replicated back to FSM.

 

I know ARP will give us massive benefits in terms of flexibility to manage resources, but along with setting it up and going live, what other things do we need to look out for.

 

Happy to share more information / have discussions if anyone has been through that process.

 

Alternatively if any Consultants have completed the same process with customers and can offer any advice that would be lovely.


Best Regards

Ady

@tomgreenwood can you advise Ady? 

 


Hi Ady,

Having read through your question, I see a number of requirements which would take some careful thought on how to implement.  I’ve given some high level comments below:

 

  • Migrating current work calendar's and rosters reducing set-up time for cutover
    • There isn’t an out of the box solution for this. It is possible to export FSM data to csv/excel format and this could be transformed into ARP formatted XML using one of our tools (this is non supported though).
    • It may also be possible to do this via the FSM integration framework
    • Depending on the complexity of the rotas however you may find it just as easy to create the shift templates and rotas from scratch in the ARP
  • How to manage updates in ARP i.e. calendar exceptions, shift data, and feed that back into FSM. We have our dispatch teams working solely in FSM too, so anything changing in ARP would need to be replicated back to FSM.
    • Again, there is no out of the box solution, shift changes and unavailabilities (private activities) created in PSO will not reflect back in FSM via the standard integration.  There is however an ARP broadcast that can be set up from PSO so send the ARP data to an external system e.g. a web service.  There would be some development work (maybe configuration but possibly customization) on the FSM side to update the relevant FSM tables with this information.

Hope that is some help,

 

Kind Regards,

Tom


@tomgreenwood 

First of all, apologies for not replying sooner. I must have missed the notification.

I’ll bring this up with our AM and see how best to progress.

Also do you know of any other customers who have implemented ARP from FSM as described above? If so is this something where we can reach out and ask questions around their processes.

 

Best Regards

 

Ady


@tomgreenwood

First of all, apologies for not replying sooner. I must have missed the notification.

I’ll bring this up with our AM and see how best to progress.

Also do you know of any other customers who have implemented ARP from FSM as described above? If so is this something where we can reach out and ask questions around their processes.

 

Best Regards

 

Ady

Hi Ady,

I don’t personally know any customers who have been through this process but have reached out within the IFS community to see if anyone else has so I will get back to you if there is. 

Kind Regards,

Tom


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