Service Versus Profitability
Resources can be associated with one or more costs including working time, overtime and travel time. The revenues and the costs of undertaking an activity can be balanced against each other to decide which resource and in which order activities should be performed. The most important costs are associated with performing an activity and this can vary with time. For example if an engineer misses an SLA and is close to missing another, is it more important to go to the second job and be very late for the first or is it better to miss both jobs by a small amount?
Complete control of service and profitability
By assigning different values including the penalties for missed SLAs it is possible for the 360 DSE to work out in real time the value to a company of any number of activities in relation to each other and enable complete control of how the scheduling engine will handle them. For example it is possible to deliver the best possible level of service to customers but incur greater costs in so doing or use a best-cost case scenario in line with the business’ KPIs.
The cost of travel might also take precedence meaning tight routing, but this could impact SLA performance. Focusing on SLA performance however could result in engineers using less than optimal routes between jobs. Through the time-dependent revenues and resource costs the precise behavior of the schedules can be tailored to meet the business needs.