Bucket Scheduling
Telecommunication companies, utilities, and many other organizations that schedule large field organizations often use the concept of bucket scheduling (also known as slot or group scheduling). The basic idea is that you schedule service work (new services, preventative maintenance, emergency repairs, and so on) in big buckets of time. Each bucket is assigned for a geographic area (say NE, SE, NW, and SW).
For any given day an estimate is made of how many slots will be made available in each geographic area. Suppose that work takes one hour on average, travel time is one hour, and there are ten workers in each geographic area. Assuming an eight hour work day, that means there are forty appointments available on any given day (each appointment takes two hours, one to do the work, and one for travel time, so four per day).
In the bucket scheme work is assigned to each bucket until it’s full. On the day of service a manager has to match up the individual technicians who are available with the work that’s been assigned to the bucket. In my posting on ROI on Automated Scheduling I’ve written about how expensive the “day of” scheduling is.
One challenge of bucket scheduling is that you cannot confirm a fixed time when someone will show up for a customer. Often the best that can be done is morning or afternoon. Real time scheduling solutions like ours schedules each individual technician at the time that an order is booked. This means that customers can be given a fixed date and time when someone will show up to do service work providing a better customer experience.
While the advantages of real time scheduling can be demonstrated, many service organizations find it challenging to move from bucket scheduling to real time scheduling. In order to do real time scheduling, the schedules of each individual technician must be established ahead of time. This requires more planning and a change to the business processes of the organization. Changing business processes requires people to think in new ways.
Our scheduling platform is designed to adapt to an organizations existing workflow, but we still have to help our prospects make the leap from letting people schedule the individual technicians to letting software do it automatically. The benefits of real time scheduling have been demonstrated in the marketplace. Rather than use buckets for scheduling, I’d prefer to use them for a fun day at the beach.