Scheduling in Enterprise

At eOptimize, we focus on automating the scheduling of people and resources in large enterprises.  What’s surprising is how entrenched the people scheduling problem is in enterprises. Scheduling often falls into one of these categories:

• Individual scheduling.  You need to schedule a meeting with two other people, so you start the email exchanges.  Five or ten email messages later you finally have a date and time to meet.  Did you keep track of the time those email messages took?  I didn’t think so.
• Outlook and Exchange scheduling.  You can use the scheduling tab in Outlook to schedule a meeting within your organization.  I’ve been an Outlook and Exchange user for a decade and it’s only since joining eOptimize that I’ve started learning how to use the scheduling tab. 
• Full time schedulers.  If enough people and resources need to be scheduled, there are full time schedulers.  These schedulers often have tools to provide views into multiple people’s calendars.  They visually scan these multiple calendars until they can find an opening and jam in an appointment.  This is often augmented with paper-based systems or a dozen or more Excel spreadsheets.  Not only do organizations have to pay for the full time people, the schedules they create often have gaps, reducing utilization of the people they are scheduling.
• Automated scheduling.  Inform an application of what needs to be done and get the application to automatically find a set of openings.  In simple cases, this is easy. Once you need multiple people, or each person needs additional resources, or you have to pick the person with the right skills the problem quickly becomes incredibly complex.  Our scheduling platforms solve this problem, providing automated scheduling answers in seconds, no matter how difficult the scheduling problem.

Despite the depth of the challenges in scheduling people, there is no job title that includes scheduling.  You cannot go to business school and learn people scheduling. There are few recognized experts in optimizing people scheduling.  In future posts, we will shine a light on the people scheduling problem and provide solutions for reducing the need for scheduling time.  At the same time, we’ll show how automated scheduling increases your people resource utilization.

David Greer

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Outlook, Scheduling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.