Schedule Optimization
Summarize
Summary of Schedule Optimization
Schedule Optimization in ServiceNow enables customers to efficiently optimize task scheduling and auto-assign tasks while adapting to changing conditions. By applying configurable policies, it creates optimal schedules that maximize task assignments and minimize travel time, helping organizations improve service delivery and operational efficiency.
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Key Benefits
- Boost Customer Satisfaction: Create predictable schedules prioritizing high-value work and ensure SLAs are met, allowing teams to focus on exceptional cases.
- Decrease Costs: Efficiently coordinate large teams, reduce travel time and overtime, and improve first-time fix rates.
- Increase Revenue: Fit more jobs into working hours, enhancing customer loyalty and satisfaction.
- Increase Agent Productivity: Enable quick transitions between assignments, minimize travel time, fuel consumption, and emissions.
Key Components
- Policies: Define optimization goals by blending objectives and constraints tailored to your team and operational context (e.g., minimizing travel time for city-based technicians).
- Scopes: Link tasks to policies based on assignment groups or geographical territories to ensure policies apply to relevant tasks and resources.
- Batches: Configure when and how optimizations run, enabling timely adaptation to changing schedules or conditions.
All configuration is managed within the ‘Schedule Optimization’ Application Scope.
Use Cases and Integrations
- Territory-Based Scheduling: Works with Field Service Territory Planning to manage multi-territory assignments for agents responsible in multiple areas over longer batch windows.
- Intra-day Optimization: Supports real-time re-optimization for groups or territories responding to cancellations, delays, or new tasks. Requires Field Service Scheduling Automation.
- Capacity and Reservations Management: Integrates to allocate tasks considering team capacities and contractor reservations prior to scheduling.
- Planned Crews: Optimizes assignments for pre-created planned crews (dynamic crews are not supported).
- Workforce Optimization Integration: Considers agent schedules and events from Workforce Optimization for Field Service to auto-assign tasks efficiently.
- Advanced Task Dependencies: Assigns tasks effectively by considering complex dependencies between tasks.
The Schedule Optimization enables you to optimize task scheduling, auto-assign tasks, and adapt to changing conditions. By applying policies, you can create the best possible schedule that maximizes task assignment and minimizes travel time.
Key Benefits
- Boost customer satisfaction
- Create more predictable schedules, give preference to high-priority work, and help ensure SLAs are met. Focus on solving exceptional cases while Schedule Optimization handles the majority of tasks.
- Decrease costs
- Coordinate and direct a large number of agents efficiently. Schedule the best resource to help ensure a first-time fix. Reduce travel time and overtime.
- Increase revenue
- Fit more jobs into working hours to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Agent productivity
- Increase agent productivity by enabling quick transitions between assignments. Minimize travel time to reduce fuel consumption and lower emissions.
Schedule Optimization workflow diagram
The following figure illustrates the high-level workflow of Schedule Optimization.
Key components in Schedule Optimization
Policies encapsulate your optimization goals by blending objectives and constraints. Knowing your objectives and constraints allows you to tailor your optimization strategies effectively. For example, if your team consists of 20 technicians operating within a city, a policy can be configured to minimize travel time. By running an optimization batch the night prior, the system streamlines tasks, cutting down on commuting time.
Scopes link tasks to policies and can be based on assignment groups or geographical territories. Selecting the appropriate scope is critical to ensure that your policies are applied to the right set of tasks, optimizing your resources where it counts.
Batches are the configurations that set when and how your optimizations occur. Running batches at strategic times allows you to adapt to changes and needs swiftly.
Schedule Optimization based on territories
Use Schedule Optimization with Field Service Territory Planning to schedule complex multi-territory assignments where an agent might be responsible for multiple territories over a longer batch processing period. Assign tasks to agents whether they’re primary or secondary members of a single or multiple territories.
Intra-day Schedule Optimization
- A cable service provider deals with last-minute cancellations.
- A weather event results in new, high-priority repair tasks.
- A technician calls out sick for the day.
Schedule Optimization based on Capacity and Reservations Management
Use Schedule Optimization with Capacity and Reservations Management to allocate tasks. This integration considers defined capacities and reservations for both internal teams and external contractors before scheduling and allocating tasks.
Schedule Optimization for Planned Crews
Use schedule optimization to optimize task assignments to planned crews. There are two types of crews: planned crews, which are pre-created, and dynamic crews, which are dynamically created as needed. Schedule optimization only supports planned crews.
Schedule Optimization with Workforce Optimization for Field Service
Use Schedule Optimization to consider agents' schedule and events from the Workforce Optimization for Field Service application to auto-assign tasks.
Schedule Optimization with advanced task dependencies
Use Schedule Optimization to efficiently assign tasks considering advanced task dependencies between them.