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Requesting Appointments
Arranging an appointment that is satisfactory to both the end customer and to the business is a compromise. From the customer’s point of view, the more specific the promised arrival time the better. From the business point of view, the situation is just the opposite: maximum flexibility and lowest costs can be achieved by making the least specific promise possible.
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Band Name | Start Time | End Time | Band Type | Comment |
D | 08:30 | 17:00 | D | The Time Band name ‘D’ is short for ‘day’. The Time Band type ‘D’ is the same. |
M | 08:30 | 12:30 | H | The Time Band name ‘M’ is short for ‘morning’. The Time Band type ‘H’ is short for ‘half-day’. |
A | 12:30 | 17:00 | H | The Time Band name ‘A’ is short for ‘afternoon’. The Time Band type ‘H’ is short for ‘half-day’. |
08 | 08:00 | 10:00 | 2 | The Time Band name ‘08’ is short for ‘the time slot starting at 08:00’. The Time Band type ‘2’ is short for ‘2 hour duration’. |
10 | 10:00 | 12:00 | 2 | The Time Band name ‘10’ is short for ‘the time slot starting at 10:00’. The Time Band type ‘2’ is again short for ‘2 hour duration’. |
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Promise Sets
Packaging is based on the use of lists of Time Bands called Promise Sets. When ServiceOptimizer is requested to offer some appointments, a Promise Set is supplied. If an employee is available to work on a job starting at a particular time, and if that time is between the start time and end time of one or more Time Bands in the Promise Set, then those Time Bands are returned as the promises to be offered to the customer. The other important part of packaging is that any duplicate promises are discarded.
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When appointments (promises) are requested, one of the parameters to the Request Appointments SOAP API, numReq, is the number of appointments required. It represents the number of promises required of the particular Time Band type given in the parameter numReqType.
In the previous example, if numReq was given the value 1, and numReqType was D, then all three promises would be returned.
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The Request Appointments SOAP API Any other appointments found as a result of the Promise Sets requested via the Thus, in the above example, three appointments found (Band |
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This way of using the numReq and numReqType parameters is necessary because a Promise Set can contain Time Bands of different types. When this is the case, it is difficult to know how big to make the array supplied to the Integration ServiceOptimizer Request Appointments SOAP API to contain the offers returned. In the worst possible case, if numReq has the value N, and the number of Time Bands in the Promise Set requested is M, the number of offered appointments will be N×M.
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