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We are using FSM and PSO. We have technicians working out of fixed bases throughout the USA. Normally they will work within their base “division” (an address with lat/long set up in FSM and passed to PSO) area, however some are flex techs and need to work at surrounding bases from time to time.

Currently every base has an equivalent Division set up in PSO. The questions are:

How does PSO figure/configure the scheduling area for a Division?

What is the difference between a Division and a Region, in PSO terms. We have included the FSM baseline column Region in Address records in FSM, but are not using it yet for PSO.

Since travel by techs can sometimes be long distances, we have null values for MaxTravel for each Resource in PSO, and thought that setting up Regions and using the OOR would help us limit who goes where? Currently all techs (hundreds) have Divisions assigned (base location). As some techs work heavily in city areas around a base, and other parts of the country the techs travel quite a bit, how best to configure this to control scheduling areas?

Example: Techs in a southern California base can drive several hours to work in other bases’ areas if needed. Techs in Georgia work primarily within cities of their bases, etc.

The PSO documentation seems a bit slim on explaining how this all works.

Thanks for thoughts/guidance.

Hi,

In PSO, Divisions and Regions means same thing (in ARP we refer them as Divisions usually and Regions in Scheduling side). 

Important thing is, entering a region record does not automatically create a geographical boundary. If you create a region named “Southern California”, you need to have a mechanism in FSM so that this region id is assigned for places in actual geographical boundary of Southern California. Then, both tasks and resources will have this region connected and then PSO can use as a scheduling constraint.


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