Activity Visits in Scheduling Engine

This description is divided into the following sections:

What is a Visit in Scheduling Engine?
Visit Parameters
Scheduling with Visits

What is a Visit in Scheduling Engine?

An Activity in Scheduling engine can be split up into multiple visits. If the work requires that the resource needs to visit the location multiple times, due to for example the duration of the work, the Activity can be divided into the visits needed. The resource might for example start to work on an activity in the afternoon (the first visit) and need to come back the next day to complete the work (the second visit of the same Activity). The Activities that can be split into visits are Activities of the class 'CALL'. Each Visit will have a Visit Id. The Visit Id starts with Visit Id 1 for the first visit of the Activity and continues as a sequence number for the following visits. An Activity that is not split up into multiple visits will then have Visit Id = 1. In the Scheduling Schema the Visit Id is handled on the Entity <Activity_Status> as an Integer.

Note: The split of an Activity into multiple visits is for one specific resource. I.e the same resource must be allocated for all the visits of the same activity.

What can split an Activity into multiple Visits?

Shifts: If the Activity has a longer duration, which means it cannot be scheduled within one shift, the work could be scheduled as one visit in the first shift and another visit for the next day/shift. As many visits as required would be created based on the duration of the Activity and the underlying shift pattern.
Breaks: Another entity that has affect on the splitting of the activity into visits are 'BREAK' Activities within a resource's shift. Lunches and other Break-type activities within the shift could split the Activity into multiple Visits, before and after the breaks.

Visit Parameters

There are a couple of parameters that controls the visit handling in Scheduling engine. The parameters are: Minimum Visit Duration, Cost of Split and Allow Multiple Visits. These Parameters can be defined on Activity Types in Service and Maintenance/Scheduling/Basic Data/Scheduling Basic Data and on the Work Tasks in Service and Maintenance/Work Task Management/Work Task. On the Activity Types in the basic data the option is there to mark which Activity Types that should be allowed to be split into visits. This is done by enabling the Allow Multiple Visits on the Activity Types. A Work Tasks that is created with a certain Activity Type marked with Allow Multiple Visits will then be set as Allow Multiple Visits and the Activity/Activities for this Work Task could be split up into a number of visits if necessary in Scheduling engine.

Minimum Visit Duration: The Minimum Visit Duration specifies the minimum duration that each visit for an activity need to have. When the Activity is split up into several visits each visit must be equal or greater in duration than this value. The value can be defined on Activity Types or directly on a Work Task. The value for Minimum Visit Duration set on the Activity Type will be inherited to the Work Task if defined with that particular Activity Type. The value can be further refined on each Work Task if needed. An example for the use of Minimum Visit Duration: A Work Task/Activity is created for 8 hour duration. The Minimum Visit Duration is set to 1 hour. The Activity is scheduled starting from 1:30PM in the afternoon. One Visit is created from 1:30 - 5PM (3,5 hours), next Visit is scheduled for the next day for 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM (4hours). The remaining time for the last visit of the Activity to be scheduled is then 0,5hours. Though, the Minimum Visit Duration is set as 1 hour which will result in that Visit 3 is scheduled from 1:00 - 2:00PM for a 1 hour length. This making the total Activity length as 8,5 hours. This parameter could be used to prevent the scheduling engine to schedule visits that are of the minute-type length.
Cost of Split: Cost of split is the cost of splitting an activity into two visits. By applying the cost of split for an Activity the Scheduling Engine will apply this cost to the total value of the schedule. By doing so the scheduling engine will encourage to schedule fewer visits. When the scheduling cost is set as zero it means that no penalties will be applied for that the Activity is split into a number of visits. The cost of split is defined on the Activity Types in Service and Maintenance/Scheduling/Basic Data/Scheduling Basic Data
Allow Multiple Visits: On Activity Types in basic data it is possible to set if the Activity Type should be allowed to be split up in a number of visits or not. If this is enable the Activity can be split up into multiple visits by the Scheduling Engine. The value enable/disable will be inherited to Work Tasks that are defined with this Activity Type. On the Work Task itself this option is also available to be edited independently of what is set on the Activity Type in the basic data setup.

Scheduling with Visits

An Activity that is scheduled with visits is handled with some differences compared to an Activity that is not split up into multiple visits. For a split Activity that is within the schedule and allocated to a resource the resulting allocation suggestions sent back to IFS Cloud will have a row for each visit in the <Activity_Status> Entity. In the Allocation tab in Work Task/Scheduling/Allocations the allocations suggestions will have the ID of each visit in the Visit Id field. If the Activity is not split the Visit Id is always 1 for such an Activity. If the Activity is split there will be one record for each Visit Id in the allocations-tab.

Visit Statuses

Two of the statuses in Scheduling engine are related to a splittable Activity. These statuses are: Follow On and Visit Complete. These would only be applied for Activities that are set as Allow Multiple Visits.

Follow On: Follow On status is used on individual Visits for an Activity and denotes that one of the visits that is scheduled earlier for the Activity is in committed status. So any future visits for such Activity that are not committed will be in Follow On status, under the condition that one or more earlier visits for the same Activity are committed. The Follow On Visits will be Scheduled for the same resource as the earlier committed ones. The Work Assignments created from the allocation suggestions in Scheduling engine will denote if the Work Assignment Visit has any Follow-On Visits. This will is done by a enable that is then shows on the Work Assignment. The Follow On Status resides after Allocated and before Committed in the status chain.
Visit Complete: Visit Complete status denotes that a visit is completed, but the full activity is not yet completed. When this status is applied on a visit, at least one follow-on visit will be created for the remaining work. When the full work is completed the last visit is then set to Complete status. For executing Work Assignments in a chain of visits; When changing the status of a Work Assignment to Completed, and there are remaining work to be done (Work Assignment is set as Has Follow On Visits), the status of Visit Complete is sent to Scheduling engine for that Visit. When setting the last Work Assignment in a visit chain to Completed (Work Assignment does not have any follow- on Visits) the status Complete is sent to Scheduling engine. The status of Visit Complete resides after Pending Completion and before Complete in the status chain.

Time to Completion

For Activities that are scheduled with multiple visits the tracking of the estimated remaining time of the work is an important aspect. To track this, and to update the duration of the full Activity accordingly to estimated remaining time, the Time To Completion should be stated when each visit is completed. Example is an Activity of 5 hour duration that is split into 2 visits for the work. Visit 1 is 4 hours. Visit 2 is 1 hour. When executing the work and changing the status of visit 1 to complete there will be an option to state the Time to Completion. The default option given in the Time to Completion dialog will be the Activity Duration deducted with actual hours spent on the job uptil that point. The actual hours is calculated from the precious visit work assignments start until set to completed (denoted on each Work Assignment as Actual Worked Hours). The value in the Time to Completion field can be edited. If it is increased by 1 hour the duration of the Activity will be increased by 1 hour, resulting in a 6 hour Activity in this example. This means that additional visits will be scheduled by Scheduling engine or Follow On visits will extend their duration accordingly (in this case Visit 2 could be scheduled as 2 hour duration). In the same way the duration of the Activity will decrease with the corresponding amount if the user edits the Time to Completion to a lower value.

When the Time to Completion is set to 0 hours, meaning that the job is finished, the remaining visits scheduled will be removed. This is because that all the work is seen as done when time to Completion is set as 0 hours and there will be no need t act on the next-coming visits for this job.

Incomplete work

When a resource is not able to complete the work for a split Activity it is recommended to mark the work as Incomplete and add a new Activity/Work Task for the remaining work. This allows for more flexibility in setting the requirements for the re-visit rather than using split activities for the re-visits of such work. When incompleting the work assignment an Incomplete Cause must be defined. There is also the possibility to enter the expected remaining duration of the work when incompleting. The expected remaining duration enterred in the incomplete cause dialog will update the duration of the work task activity with the enttered value.