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PSO - Accepting Multiple Offer Responses

AdrianEgley
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Hi,

 

Background

Traditionally we have used PSO to get a list of appointment offers via ABE for a resource to be allocated to a task. The user, or customer online will select a single appointment offer. Nice and easy.

 

Question

Is it possible, or does anyone else out there allow multiple appointment offers to be accepted.

Example being:

The customer, or agent would select all the appointment offers they would be happy with, and this information is passed to the DSE.

 

The idea being is that is would look to schedule (in this example) for Tuesday 27th as the soonest. But if anything was to happen, or tasks were to be created with a greater value, the DSE would know that it could move the task from the 27th to the 29th AM time slot as an example.

 

Hope that makes sense.

 

Regards

Ady

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Best answer by Phil Lamerton 21 May 2021, 16:38

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S
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Hi Adrian,
 

Even though we send multiple offer responses (with respective availabilities etc.), it seems PSO only accept one offer response for one activity. In that sense, I think we cannot do this. But please notice there can be a way which I’m unaware of. Probably RnD team can answer.

 

Best Regards,

Sajith

  

AdrianEgley
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Hi @Sajith Anushan 

 

Just wondering if there’s anyone from RnD that could answer this question on here?

 

cc @Phil Lamerton 

Cheers Ady

Phil Lamerton
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@Sajith Anushan can you pleasepost in the tech forum and tag IFSACH and then I can get R&D input :) 

S
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Hi @Phil Lamerton 

That would be a good idea since as I remember, some functionality to select multiple responses are added in UPD7 (replied prior to UPD7 release).

Can’t Ady simply change the forum of this post?

Regards,

Sajith

Phil Lamerton
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@Sajith Anushan ACH is internal only ;) so he can’t 

S
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Oh, thought he is IFS internal. ;) I’ll post this in internal tech forum.

Phil Lamerton
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@AdrianEgley well that's a compliment!!! :wink:

AdrianEgley
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@Sajith Anushan / @Phil Lamerton 

 

Thank you both.

That is appreciated

Ady

Phil Lamerton
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Hi Ady,

See the release enhancements here for UP7 and note the following, not sure if that what you need?

Appointment Booking Improvements
The Appointment Booking Engine can be configured to allow overbooking for resources. Overbooking allows more work to be appointed to resources than is capable. This is useful as if work cannot be completed, for example, a customer does not show, then the resource can continue to work from the overbooked appointments.
The utilisation check can also be further refined by making use of the optional attributes
'slot_usage_window_start' and 'slot_usage_window_end' in the 'Appointment_Template_Item' schema. If provided, these values will be used as the start and end times for the slot usage utilisation check,
regardless of the actual slot start and end times.
Prospective allocation information is returned with the appointment offer, with details on resource id and allocation start.

 

Thanks

 

Phil

 

Phil Lamerton
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Hi Ady,

Was the response helpful? 

Thanks

Phil

AdrianEgley
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Hi,

Apologies, I saw the response and thought I replied :face_palm_tone3: . 

Not quite what I am looking for. The overbooking could work for us with regards to Repairs, but not activities where we need to get the stock.

 

I’m looking more for users being able to choose multiple appointment offers as opposed to just one. Then DSE would start to build plans accordingly.

 

Example being they could select 5 offers (could be more, could be less).

But as more activities are created DSE would look to utilise these and could move from 28th to 30th, then to the 27th as when required.

We would then build rules into our comms to fix activities at certain points.

Just from personal experience if the product being worked on is in the same place and the customer is flexible for appointments then can we work that into the scheduling.

 

Hope that makes sense.

 

Ady

Phil Lamerton
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Hi Ady,

Response from Cass:

I don’t believe you could accept more than one offer but you could still use the offers and offers value to specify multiple SLAs and control the preference for each SLA window through the shape of each SLA.  For example, the preferred slot could have an SLA start and end proportion of 1, and the next less preferred could have a SLA start and end proportion of .8 and so on.  I would suggest accepting the preferred slot as there is a risk that the other slots would get taken.  However, there are so many factors going on this may still not give the desired result.  For example, if the job is being scheduled in the SLA for the preferred slot then no capacity is being used on the other SLAs so appointments may get booked on those days.  Then if the appointment needs to get pushed back there may be no capacity or it may not have a high enough value to get scheduled in.  Therefore, a more detailed understanding of the scheduling problem is needed to determine if this is an option.

Thanks

Phil

Phil Lamerton
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Confirmation from R&D
You cannot accept more than one appointment offer. Cass’s discussion above gives some good examples of how you could achieve some of the behavior that you are looking for.

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