Enterprise resource management
Tom Helmer
Convergent Group
6399 South Fiddler's Green Circle
Suite 600
Greenwood Village, CO 80111
The Problem Space: Work Force Schedulers
As automation efforts reach to the field workforce, the types of work requiring scheduling and
dispatching also grows. This section of the paper will focus on how current technologies address
the scheduling and dispatching problems and will highlight where using just these products falls
short in attempting to manage an enterprise workforce. The technologies will be treated
generically and will not try to compare individual vendors, but rather highlight their overall
strengths and discuss the integration issues.
Current Mobile Workforce Management (MWM) tools provide scheduling tools, instruments to
generate job tasks, and have their own notion of a work crew and associated equipment. The
MWM systems provide good tools to help in the forecasting and booking of service
appointments, excellent automation to aid in scheduling a day's worth of assignments to the crew
in their trucks, reasonable tools to support the auto rescheduling of today's jobs due to the
interruption of resources available, or other tasks requiring more effort than forecasted.
The areas where these MWM scheduling tools fall short are: crew definitions that require
multiple trucks, equipment, and people; hard scheduling of tasks that may have longer durations
than a couple of days; geographic and common work task tools to turn inspections, surveys, and
preventative maintenance tasks into schedulable tasks; the ability to play "what if" scenarios for
both overtime scenarios and contractor crews; the ability to give both a firm no and firm yes for
future appointments; closure with time recording systems or other Work Management Systems
(WMS) to enable tracking of the filler jobs associated with inspections, surveys, and preventative
maintenance programs; and in the dynamic merging and splitting of crews required to effectively
work emergencies.
Current WMSs provide tools for accepting work requests and scheduling long-duration types of
work. They also have their own notion of a crew and its makeup in terms of trucks, person skills,
and equipment. The WMS scheduling engines support their own scheduling heuristics as well as
integrating with third-party Critical Path Model (CPM) scheduling engines. Most WMS
scheduling architectures require quite a bit of human interaction to support task-to-crew
assignments and the management of task interdependencies between scheduling runs.
These WMS scheduling tools fall short because they do not support the: interactive management
requirements to daily update assignments; graphical visualizations required to play "what if"
analysis of scheduling with contractor crews as well as with overtime allotments; ability to break
up work order tasks by both task type and location to optimize daily crew assignments; ability to
reschedule assignments before they are missed; tight integration with CPM tools to allow
multiple schedulers to play their own "what if" analysis and then merge everyone's scheduled
tasks into one master schedule; ability to maintain task dependencies between runs with
third-party CPM tools; dynamic merging and splitting of crews required to effectively work
emergencies.
Current Outage Management Systems (OMS) provide tools to easily prioritize trouble and
emergency work tasks but rely heavily on the human dispatcher to schedule trouble work. Tools
do exist to give feedback on actual average durations per type of outage. Outage tools do support
the forecasting of resources required to repair the network based on current trouble orders. The
automation flows of these systems support the human troubleshooter extremely well. The main
support an enterprisewide scheduler could provide is after the first or second day, to schedule
and predict how much work is left from the storm. These tools again have their own notion of a
crew and its makeup. Outage systems do support the dynamic nature of trouble crews. There are
no scheduling tools in most OMS toolsets.
Along with service work, trouble work, and construction work, there exists a need to fill in the
daily workload of these crew types with inspections, surveys, and preventative maintenance
tasks. The tools that help define and manage these tasks typically are at a higher level of
abstraction than daily task lists that a MWM dispatching engine is looking for. These tools do a
great job of developing the Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) workloads, but do not deal
with the scheduling and management issues of duration-based work.
The following diagram illustrates where MWM, WMS, and OMS systems fit into the automation
flows of getting work scheduled and dispatched to crews in the field. One can infer from the
diagram that both integration and semantic issues are present for all flows that cross color
boundaries. All of the systems have different semantic meaning for the two fundamental pieces
of information that must be input for a scheduler: task definitions and resource definitions. Each
has a task that is defined well enough to be assigned and dispatched to a crew and each has its
own definition of the crew that is supposed to be schedulable. Some of these systems will have
tasks defined as abstract as "x miles of pipe needing inspections over the next 3 years", and
others will have concrete task definitions such as "check the service drop to a 'lights-out'
customer at address xxx at 2:00 p.m."
Overview of Task Types and Multitude of Sources Needing to Drive The Scheduling
Engine
