Optimiser | Configuration

Summary

The optimiser will look at all of your team's schedules on a nightly basis to find the most optimal solution for the day's appointments whilst maintaining the appointment commitments made to your clients. The optimisers primary objective is to minimise overall drive time.

We recommend that Partners also enable our Geo-Coordinates feature before starting to work with the optimiser. Working with coordinates and the Alerts page will allow users to identify sites and resources that have missing geo-coordinates that may negatively affect optimiser performance.

Please read this guide then raise a support ticket for guidance on next steps.

Requirements

Pooled Appointments: In order to benefit from using the new optimiser, a proportion of your appointments will need to be booked as pooled appointments. As only pooled appointments can be moved (within their allocated time window) you will find greater efficiency savings and more optimal schedules if you are able to move a booking a greater number of visits as pooled appointments.
Resources Postcodes: We require resources to have a valid postcode in order for drive times for the first appointment of the day and appointments following on from a non-working time event to be calculated.
Site Postcodes: Sites are required to have a valid postcode in order for drive time to be calculated. When booking an appointment, if the site has an invalid postcode we use 'Default drive time' value (usually set to 10 minutes). As the optimisation engine views the appointment location as a hard constraint it will be unable to obtain a drive time if the postcode is missing or invalid and thus unable to deliver further efficiency gains in that team-day schedule. Users will be made aware of any issue identified in optimising any schedules via the 'Alerts' page, so anomalies can rectified ahead of the next optimisation run.

Configuration

Optimisation Start Days [OPTSD]

This value will represent the number of days into the future that you want the optimiser to be considering. For example, should you set this to two days, it would mean that we would not optimise the schedule for any appointments planned to start in the next two days. This is usually set to two days to prevent scheduling changes for the next day as the operatives usually see two days worth of appointments on the mobile application.
The value needs to be a whole number.

Optimisation Run Days [OPTRD]

This value will represent how many days the optimiser will run for after the value from the start days. For example, 8 days would run for 8 days starting in 2 days time if that's what the start days has been populated with.
The value needs to be a whole number.

Rules

Only Pooled appointments will be rescheduled
Appointments will only be rescheduled within the same 'committed' day division
Appointments will only be rescheduled for the same team If the pooled appointment has been fixed to a particular resource it will not reschedule to another resource (This occurs when you select a resource name on the pooled scheduler)
If the original scheduled appointment used a secondary postcode or service the optimiser will continue to use these settings to reschedule the appointment
The optimiser will reschedule the appointments to reduce the overall drive time, this could be by changing the appointment sequence or rescheduling to a different resource

Alerts Page

The new alerts page will report on nightly optimiser runs for both 'Pass' and 'Fail' events as well as the output from the optimiser successes.

Optimiser failures

If the engine fails to optimise a teams appointment for a specific day, it will highlight the affected team, day and reason for failure. By clicking on the row you will be able to access the scheduler for the relevant date and team to allow the user to resolve any issues. A schedule may fail to optimise due to the schedule already being as 'optimised' as possible without lifting constraints applied by the user or organisation.

Please view the Optimiser Messaging and Alerts page for more information.

Successful Optimiser Reporting

The table will display an individual line for each team and appointment schedule date as well as the total gain from all optimisation runs for this team-day combination. If the same day has been optimised multiple times you can click on the row to view the outcome from each run.

Please view the Alerts page for more information.

Feature Enablement & Migration

Oneserve Technical team can set the new optimiser to run in either 'Passive' or 'Active' modes.

Passive Mode: The current optimiser will continue to be used to reschedule and update appointments but behind the scenes, the new optimiser will run and report issues into the new Alerts module. The new optimiser will not change any appointments during this process but will provide the details on how much it could have improved the schedule by. We recommend Partners enable the new optimiser in this mode first to get comfortable with the functionality before looking to enable this on their Live application.
Active Mode: When using this setting, the new optimiser will reschedule appointments and report the optimiser outcome using the new Alerts module.

Next Steps

Please raise a support ticket with Oneserve if you would like to enable the Optimiser
You will need to provide the values you would like to use for 'Optimisation Start Days' and 'Optimisation Run Days' listed in the configuration section above. The default values are set to 'Start Days = 2 and 'Run days = 8'
Our technical team will set the OPTIMISER_MODE setting to reference the new optimiser, this will require your application to be restarted for the changes to take effect.
The alerts page will be enabled to allow optimiser results to be published.
You will need to wait until the next day to allow the optimiser to run overnight before you see any results.