Those of you with children may recall the book “The Little Engine That Could.”  The story is about how a little engine that is personified as someone who tries hard and succeeds, gets a train load of toys and food over the mountain for the children in the next town by repeating “I think I can, I think I can.”

While the analogy is a stretch, our scheduling engine is the core platform that let’s people perform on time.  Like “The Little Engine That Could”, our scheduling platform has the intelligence and scale to always get over the mountain of complex scheduling problems.

Rather than pull from the front of the train, we sit in the middle of all important IT systems, coordinating the complex information that let’s us automate individual schedules and workflow.  James Taylor at Smart (enough) Systems calls us an Enterprise Decision Management system. EDMs operate in real-time to make operational decisions for organizations from moment to moment.  The advantage of EDMs is that they are operating on up-to-date information, resulting in faster and better decisions.

In many organizations information silos make it difficult to automate decisions such as people’s schedules.  Calendar information is stored in MS Exchange.  For telecommunication companies, customer information is in their OSS or BSS. Provisioning inventory might be in another application.  Individual skills for engineers are in the HR database.  Because we are a service oriented architecture (SOA) web service, we can sit in between all of these applications.  By combining all of the data, we are able to make intelligent scheduling decisions faster and better than human beings can.

If a financial services call center is taking calls to book appointments for advisors to make customer visits across the US, we again have to deal with multiple information silos.  The customer application has the address, information we can use to compute travel times, physical location, and time zones.  Each advisor is licensed to operate in specific states, so the HR database needs to be interrogated to verify license information.  Individual calendars are stored in MS Exchange.  No individual call center person can keep all the variables straight in their head.  If there’s no automated solution, our experience is that there is an entire team of managers who take every request and then manually match all the information to find scheduling solutions.  Not only is this labor intensive, there are so many manual steps that it is error prone.

At eOptimize we have the enterprise decision management platform that can scale to take all these complex information silos and produce correct scheduling answers in real-time.  Our scheduling engine solves your people and resource scheduling challenges, just like “The Little Engine That Could.”

David Greer

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Scheduling, Workflow. 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.