Enterprise resource management

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

Current Solutions and Trends
One approach to integration is to look at all of the resource schemas and use the least common denominator to define the company's crews. This allows all applications (MWM, OMS, WMS) to use the same view of resources and lets each application "schedule" the type of work they manage best. Most of the systems support some kind of crew inactive flag so that even though it has been defined, the crew is not schedulable or assignable until it is placed in its active state. Having each of the systems "steal" and "return" resources is one approach to getting the most out of the existing scheduling functionalities of each of the technologies. This allows MWM to schedule future appointments and to dispatch all work to crews. WMS is allowed to schedule longer-duration work orders and feeds the next day's scheduled tasks to the MWM for dispatching. The RCM tools feed filler tasks to the MWM, which has the capability to automatically assign and dispatch this type of work to qualified resources. OMS typically takes advantage of the MWM's ability to support the fixed assignment of resources to tasks to handle emergency dispatching requirements. To support a global view of all current work assignments, a virtual status board depicting all crews and their status changes are fed by the crew within each of the systems. Most of the mobile systems support tracking crew enroute, crew at site, crew signed out, etc. Trouble systems support orders dispatched and orders queued or assigned. WMS systems support orders queued or assigned. RCM systems support specifying facilities requiring inspections, surveys, or preventative maintenance tasks. These need to be enhanced typically via GIS technology to include overlaying the locations of current work tasks with the locations of the facilities needing to be inspected, surveyed, or requiring some program manager work on them.

Current Research and Future Possibilities
Based on deploying these technologies over the last six years, there are a number of deficiencies that an enterprise resource management application would fill. Some of the functionalities that have been identified to have business benefits are:

Six-week rolling "real" schedule
Graphical timeline calendar
Support for "What If" scenarios to compare costs of schedules
Cross-utility support
Crew database
Multiple sources providing the definitions of tasks to be scheduled
Task type, skill type, and location optimizations
Support for trouble interruption and auto rescheduling of all existing jobs
Potential for auto scheduling and dispatching trouble orders to trouble crews
Dynamic task creation and auto rescheduling
Enterprise-accessible map board of all crews

The current workforce applications (MWM, OMS, WMS) would need to become more open in their architectures to support integration with such an enterprise resource manager. The workforce applications would still be the right place to define the tasks. The enterprise resource manager would be the global view of the company's crews and support the management of task interdependencies between the separate applications. This would allow the supervisors and schedulers of today's systems to spend much more time analyzing and optimizing system-generated schedules rather than manually scheduling and reviewing the schedules from the separate systems. This would enable more of a program management approach to defining tasks, durations, and task dependencies and allowing the enterprise resource manager to schedule and spread the tasks evenly over the workforce.

Integration Issues
Each of the workforce applications has distinct architectures. And, at a high level, any application that supports the manual assignment of tasks to crews (typically all three support this and in some cases it is critical to the overall workflow (OMS), would require interactive integration so that the human scheduler would be able to take advantage of all of the visual aids the enterprise resource manager provides to support the manual overriding of its generated schedule. Most of these systems (MWM, WMS) have architectures that support third-party CPM schedulers to feed back the schedules into their respective systems for further refinement and actual dispatching. There are severe limitations in workgroup scheduling support in most of these current architectures. They assume a single corporate scheduling czar is running and managing the scheduling runs. There is the need for a workgroup approach and the need to merge schedules.

The need for the enterprise resource manager to allow for varying degrees of abstraction in task definitions is a major hurdle to overcome. The need to treat the MWM as the conduit to the mobile workforce requires one to adhere to their generic task types and crew assignments to take advantage of their auto dispatching functionality. Refining and breaking up abstract task definitions to be dispatched in the form of a task list can be difficult to automate.

The closed loop integration of the enterprise resource manager with the company's time recording system would allow real metrics to be collected based on work task types and facility locations to support refined duration estimates to be used in future scheduling sessions to account for difficulty of tasks, traffic patterns, and the accessibility of specific facility locations.

Summary
Today's Energy Delivery Resource Planning (EDRP) systems take advantage of best-in-breed technology providers. This results in many systems performing some scheduling for the enterprise but no single system performing enterprisewide scheduling. Part of the complexities come from each system having their own task definitions and crew definitions. Other complexities arise from how tightly coupled the manual dispatching of tasks to crews are in their automation of the workflow to handle specific business processes. Aligning the technologies with the types of work they are best suited for does provide for a reasonable architecture to integrate the existing technologies. From an enterprise-wide resource manager view, there are some major functionality shortcomings in the current offerings and some integration issues with the current technologies to support an enterprise resource manager.