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

Scheduling is a time consuming task.  To reduce the time needed to schedule, you can use Outlook and Microsoft Exchange.  For example, I needed to schedule a meeting today with Dave Harestad, eOptimize VP Products and Services.  We needed our small conference room and the projector. 

To automatically schedule our design meeting, I went into Outlook 2003 and created a new appointment.  I then selected the Scheduling tab which is near the top of the dialog. I next added Dave Harestad, Conference Room - Small, and the Projector (our system administrator had created the last two resources).  I entered 12:00 - 12:30 for the meeting time.  Next I clicked on the AutoPick Next >> button near the bottom of the dialog.  This is what it looked like:

On the bottom right you can see that Outlook automatically looked ahead and found the first time when all four people and resources were available, which happened to be 3:30 today.  Visually, you can see the vertical bar in white with green and red edges which are located in the 3:30 - 4:00 time period.

I’ve used Outlook for nearly a decade and it’s only since joining eOptimize that I discovered this useful feature of Outlook and Exchange for automating scheduling. How many other Outlook users have never used this feature?  I’m guessing that it’s quite a lot.

David Greer

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