We talk about our products being designed as a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).  They are, but why should you care?  This posting attempts to explain why you might.

Historically, software applications were written with few if any open interfaces. These systems were huge, monolithic, and difficult to interface to. The challenge is that these legacy systems contain business logic that implements key decisions about business processes.  Without an easy set of interfaces, these highly valuable units of business logic are locked away, difficult to reuse, and costly to maintain.

The concept of SOA was introduced so that those involved in business processes and information technology could design software and business rules as a service. The goal was to make it much easier for companies to reuse software and to interface to SOA applications.

This was helped along by development platforms, like Microsoft’s .NET or Java’s J2EE, which make it easier to both create SOA applications and to interface to an SOA software implementation.  We estimate that it takes 50-75% less implementation work (measured as hours of work) to integrate our scheduling platform into a customer’s IT infrastructure then with comparable non-SOA scheduling solutions.  We achieve these cost savings, even if the customer’s infrastructure is based on legacy mainframe or UNIX platforms.

By being a SOA web service, we also provide customers with leverage to solve multiple business problems. Customers typically purchase and deploy one of our scheduling solutions for a particular business problem such as automating the people and workflow in telecommunication service activations.  This only involves a percentage of all of the employees in the organization. If there are scheduling challenges with another section of the business, our implementation can be used to solve those challenges with a small amount of incremental work.  Traditional business applications can sometimes be applied to new business problems, but rarely can they do so with little work effort.

When SOA is well done it brings greatly reduced integration costs and higher reusability of business logic and application solutions.  That’s why you could care about Service Oriented Architectures.

David Greer

Cartoon courtesy of Geek and Poke

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a hot topic over the last decade.  It should be as attracting and retaining customers is more challenging today than it ever has been.  In many organizations CRM sits at the heart of the enterprise, spanning marketing, sales, and service as noted in the diagram below:

When working with customers we find that there is continuous interaction between CRM and scheduling.  For example, when companies have a workflow that needs to be executed for every new customer, schedules have to be created.  In cases where people need to be scheduled in a coordinated workflow, providing scheduling answers is hard. 

For example, suppose that these steps have to be executed before a new customer can be setup:

1. One hour introductory meeting with an implementer.
2. After the introductory meeting, a project manager has to spend a half hour creating the project plan for the customer.
3. The account manager has to be scheduled to do a follow up call after the project manager has the plan.

In many companies this scheduling problem is solved by manual processes and numerous email messages back and forth between teams and the customer.  It is prone to all sorts of errors.  By automating this scheduling the customer experience completely changes:

1. They get the scheduling answers they need when they place their order.
2. Things are delivered when they said they would be.

This level of customer delivery is what people expect today.  Is your company making it easy and accurate for your customer’s first customer relationship with you to be an outstanding one?  With automated people and resource scheduling, you can.

David Greer

We are constantly amazed at the hidden costs that organizations spend on scheduling.  Rather than automate their scheduling with software platforms such as our About Time for Exchange Server, organizations defer scheduling to line managers.  It’s like being in a sailboat and constantly trying to fight your way into the wind. Thousands of managers around the world do it every day.

Many telecommunication and utility companies use the concept of bucket or slot scheduling.  They allocate so many “buckets” or “time slots” in each geographic region.  Work orders are assigned to each “bucket” or “time slot” until it is full for a given day.  It is common for the time period to be a half day, thus customers can only be told that someone will show up in the morning or the afternoon.

Ignoring the lack of customer service in this approach, consider what happens each day.  Every morning the manager in each region has to do the final scheduling, assigning the work from each “bucket” or “time slot” to individual technicians. A mid-sized telecommunications company with offices throughout the US might have a thousand field service technicians and back office engineers who have to be scheduled every day.  If we assume twenty people being scheduled per manager, there would be fifty managers.  If they each take twenty minutes to do the scheduling, that’s 2,500 minutes or almost 42 hours of management time per day.

While automated scheduling will not eliminate all this management time, it can eliminate 70-80% of it.  Because each individual technician is scheduled ahead of time, managers can focus on exceptions.  These range from someone calling in sick to emergency break and repair issues.  The net result is management being more focused on customer service and less on day-to-day operations.  As a bonus, customers are told a precise time when a technician will show up, rather than having to wait around for an entire morning or afternoon.  Automated scheduling let’s you go with the wind, giving you and your customers a smooth ride to scheduling answers.

David Greer

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

One of the ways that companies keep customers happy is by doing what they say they would do when they said they would do it.  While simple in principle it is difficult to achieve this in practice.  Companies that focus on high customer retention and high revenue per customer look for ways to automate their interactions with their customers, front-line service people, and back office employees.  That’s were we come in.

People in companies can sometimes lose sight of the customer, which is nicely illustrated by the cartoon above (used with permission from Budd Life).  For telecommunication companies we take the complex process of activating new service activations and automate the scheduling of all of the people involved in the process.  What used to look like a multi-level flow chart with unending arrows and boxes now becomes a single step process.  It’s true that there is significant setup that has to be done initially (to map those arrows and boxes into our application), but after that everything is automatic.  When people see our AboutTime for Exchange Server product in action for the first time, there is often an amazed look on their faces and we here comments like “do you mean that we really can schedule the entire process all at once?”  To which we answer, “yes you can, that’s what we do.”

Financial service companies with large institutional 401(k) retirement plans face a challenge.  The employees of their institutional customers need to schedule time with a financial planner to review or ask questions about their 401(k) retirement plan with the company. Financial service companies would like for employees with their plans to be able to self-service appointment bookings through a customized web portal.  This is a complex problem.  You need to coordinate free/busy time, match the right skill set and knowledge of the individual retirement products, often across multiple time zones and geographies, with the individual financial advisors, who could number in the hundreds or thousands.

Once again, AboutTime for Exchange Server rises to the challenge.  Around the planet we automatically schedule such complex customer appointments every day. The customer is able to get the service they need, while we insure that the individual financial planner’s time is booked appropriately.  The customer gets the call when they expect it.  That’s what customer service should be.

David Greer

What happens if you need to schedule multiple people in a business activity? To make things more challenging, what if you wanted to schedule multiple people in a multi-step process, drawing from pools of skilled people?  This is where automated scheduling can provide real benefits to organizations, producing much better human resource schedules, thus lowering costs.  At the same time, because we can schedule an entire business process, we help companies gain the capability to tell customers when events are going to take place in real time (e.g., when the customer is on the phone).

Telecommunication companies have a challenge when they are scheduling the activation of new services for their customers.  Consider activating a T1 data service (a high speed connection to the Internet that is often used by businesses).  To activate a T1 data service, there are multiple steps and people who must be scheduled.  Many telecommunication companies today solve this challenge by either using a group calendar where a fixed number of time slots are allocated to each time period in the day. Another way to schedule T1 activations is to put all open work orders in a queue and then have individuals involved in the process pull their next work activity from the top of the queue.

Both these solutions work, but they produce suboptimal schedules.  Group schedules often need a lot of manual intervention, taking up valuable management time.  Both methods require additional resources for forecasting and predicting peak loads.

Using our AboutTime for Exchange Server product, the entire T1 data service activation can be scheduled as a single group of activities.  If you created a list of possible schedules in our standard user interface, you would be offered choices that looked like:

Our user interface is showing the first two potential schedules that are available right now. We show a T1 Activation. It has five activities in the process. The first four activities are scheduling people out of four different pools of engineers. The SO Billing Update activity is always done by Brenda Peters. If you look closely, we’ve actually scheduled four different people in Option 1: Gary Robertson, Ralph Jenkins, Joe Budd, and Joanne Hiller.

The key here is that AboutTime for Exchange Server has only shown schedules where each person required in the process is available. Rather than group scheduling, we are scheduling the individuals. No matter what size enterprise you are, it’s the individual people in your organization that you need to schedule. Our scheduling platform is one of the few that solves this complicated scheduling challenge, by introducing workflow concepts that automatically takes every individual into account. It’s a different way of looking at scheduling, but one we think makes a lot of sense.

David Greer