14.1 Capacity Management

ServiceOptimizer can manage a schedule where different types of jobs have different lead times so that:

a)        Some daily capacity is held back so that it’s kept available for short lead time work such as fault fixing, and

b)       A limit can be applied to the daily capacity to do other types of work so that demand for it is smoothed out over time, particularly work booked well in advance such as service jobs or ‘drop-in’ (unconfirmed) work.

This section presents some guidelines on how capacity categories and capacity patterns should be set up to meet the business needs.   Before setting up capacity management in ServiceOptimizer, you must analyse the predictability of demand for service. The more stable and predictable demand patterns are, the easier it becomes to set accurate values.

Optimizer

Scheduling by the optimizer obeys the same rules for capacity usage as applied when jobs are booked, so if capacity checking is on, then the optimizer will only produce solutions that do not further exceeding the capacity constraints.

Whilst the optimizer treats capacity as a constraint, it will not actively attempt to resolve situations where capacity has been exceeded and it will not deallocate jobs which have exceeded capacity limits (unless there is another reason for deallocating them). 

Guidelines for Setting Capacity Limits

When setting the limit(s) you need to consider the likelihood of there being sufficient other work to fill in the schedule, as well as the processes and impact of having to bring additional work into the schedule to utilize any spare capacity.

Guidelines for Setting Capacity Reserves

Setting of reserve values needs to consider the likelihood of that level of work being booked, as well as the cost of re-arranging pre-booked work that the business would typically defer in order to satisfy the urgent request.  In other words:

• If the reserve is set too low then what is the impact (in terms of customer service and ability to re-schedule work) and cost (time and cost) of deferring, or displacing, significant amounts of pre-scheduled work?
• If the reserve is set too high, then is there a surplus of “fill-in” work that can be brought into the schedule to utilize operatives’ time?

Guidelines for Capacity Checking Level

Each FRU in ServiceOptimizer can be configured to manage capacity on an FRU or Team basis.  Furthermore, if managing at Team basis, the team can be configured such that each operative is managed separately.