There are many types of businesses that require field service maintenance. These businesses typically have geographically dispersed assets that need a variety of ongoing maintenance attention. Oil and gas, electric power transmission, local government and municipalities, and others are good examples.
Organizations such as these will typically operate several to large numbers of field crews who start their day at a shop or depot, then spend their day traveling around a territory repairing equipment and performing preventative maintenance tasks.
These work activities are provided to them by their supervisors at the start of their shift or during their shift. Supervisors normally determine which crews gets dispatched to what work by making a series of manual decision/determinations. These include, work order activity priority, skills (qualifications) of the crews vs what’s needed for the activity, proximity of the work to the crew’s territory or starting location, crew size vs people required for the activity, activity hours vs available crew hours, as well as the type of vehicle the crew drives and its capabilities. Of course, this is time consuming, and efficiencies can be lost making all these manual decisions.
Within the HxGN EAM product, supervisors traditionally utilize the GIS Map WO Dispatching screen to manually dispatch crews/employees to work orders via a map-based interface (ESRI maps). This screen works well, but again, the dispatching process depends on lots of repetitive, manual decisions being made. While this may work fine for smaller organizations, it may not be ideal for larger ones.
This is where the new integration between two Hexagon products, EAM and Constraint Optimizer, easily (and automatically) solves two of the most important problems: activity assignment and route planning. It determines the best schedule solution based on resource and activity constraints, such as qualifications, calculated priority, travel distance, and shift availability. It uses EAM data like work order activities, crews, shifts, vehicles, and skills sent automatically on a pre-scheduled basis to the Constraint Optimizer. The Constraint Optimizer dispatching algorithm matches crew skills with those required by the activities, then considers crew available hours, work order priority and driving distance to determine the optimal dispatching plan, including the sequence in which the activities should be performed, for all the organization's crews or employees for the shift. In other words, all those manual decisions are made for you. After the solution is determined, the Constraint Optimizer sends it back to EAM where the appropriate dispatching records are created (see the Dispatching tab for Work Order or View/Delete Dispatch Labor Pop-up on the GIS Map WO Dispatching screen for details).
There are 2 methods for automatically dispatching WO activities within EAM using the Constraint Optimizer:
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Shift Dispatching
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Dynamic Dispatching
The process of dispatching all available WO activities before a shift begins to attempt to fill up the crew’s/employee’s workday is referred to, in this document, as ‘shift dispatching’. This would be work that has accumulated after the previous day and prior to the first shift of the next day, or work that was not completed during the previous day. It can be many work order activities dispatched in batch fashion.
As new WO activities become available for dispatching shift dispatching process runs, they will be picked up in near real-time and dispatched. This is called ‘dynamic dispatching’.
After dispatching is performed, each crew will receive the work order activities dispatched to them using the HxGN EAM Mobile Offline and Digital Work application on their mobile device, per usual processes.
It is possible the Constraint Optimizer cannot fulfill dispatching requirements for one or more work order activities. Perhaps the qualifications of the activity could not be met by available crews, or no crew of sufficient size was available, or all crew availability was consumed for the day and un-dispatched activities still exist. In these cases, the Constraint Optimizer will send this list of work order activities, along with the reason, back to EAM. These reasons can be seen in the new Optimized Scheduler Dispatch Errors field on the Activities page for the Work Order. When the job runs the next time, it will re-send these activities to the Constraint Optimizer for dispatching at that time. There is no manual intervention necessary.
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Unless otherwise noted, this document describes the configuration and execution of the shift dispatching process. A section at the end of this document has been created to explain the dynamic dispatching process. Because the dynamic dispatching process cannot be used unless shift dispatching is use, it makes sense to organize the document in this way.
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Shift dispatching can be used without dynamic dispatching, but dynamic dispatching cannot be used unless shift dispatching is used.
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Following the initial release of this integration, the Optimized Scheduler product was renamed to the Constraint Optimizer. When referring to the Constraint Optimizer (i.e., formerly Optimized Scheduler) product in this Brief, the product name is now Constraint Optimizer; however, when referring to existing boiler text within HxGN EAM, the term Optimized Scheduler is still in use. Please note that for the purposes of this integration, the terms Optimized Scheduler and Constraint Optimizer refer to the same product.
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This integration is available for cloud and on-prem EAM deployments only. Constraint Optimizer is cloud-only.
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Access to these features is granted by the cloud operations team during their provisioning process and not a CD key.
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ESRI maps, or maps of any kind, are not required for this integration.
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A new job has been created to initiate the Constraint Optimizer integration process on a predetermined basis. See elsewhere in this document for details.
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This integration can dispatch crews and/or individual employees.
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Dispatching occurs for today’s date.
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If the work order activity is not completed on the day it was dispatched, it will be re-dispatched (possibly to a different crew/employee the next time the process runs). This rule can be altered via EAM configuration changes on the WO Activity tab for Optimized Scheduler Setup screen (see the related section in this document for details).
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Travel time can be calculated based on Euclidean (straight-line) distance or based on actual road distance. The OpenStreetMap API is used for determining road distance.