Jobs often have time constraints, start and end times in which the job must take place. Here are some examples:
Appointment Windows: You want to promise your customer that a job will take place between Monday and Friday in a given week, or on the afternoon of Tuesday 6th.
Service Level Agreements (SLA): For types of work like emergency reactive work, there may be a SLA to respond within 24 hours or by close of business.
Deadlines and Maintenance Schedules: Other types of work, like preventive maintenance, may be due to take place in the last month of every quarter.
For all of the above situations, you can use Job Time Windows to help you meet your targets and guarantee excellent customer service.
How does it work?
Setting a Time Window on a job allows you to specify the job’s earliest start time and latest finish time. These boundaries are enforced by the Scheduler and Smart Scheduler to ensure that appointments and deadlines are met.
When dragging and dropping jobs in the Scheduler, you will be guided to drop the job within the specified time window. You can drop the job outside the time window at your own discretion.
The Smart Scheduler will always try to schedule jobs within the specified time window. If it cannot schedule the job, you can manually intervene.
Good to Know
You can choose to set only the Earliest Start, or the Latest finish, or both.
To find out how to combine the fields to suit your needs, read the section below
Using Time Windows for different scenarios
Appointment Windows
An appointment window is a length of time, typically a number of hours, in which a job should take place. Set the time window by setting both the Earliest Start and the Latest Finish times for the job. The appointment window for the example below is 4 hrs - from 8am to 12 noon on April 30th.
Bear in mind that the end time of the Time Window is its Latest Finish. It is not the latest arrival time for the technician.
Service Level Agreements (SLA)
For some customers and/or job types, your service organization may have a commitment to respond within a certain timeframe. You can use job time windows to capture this commitment.
Let’s say our organization as a SLA to respond within 24 hours. In the example below, the customer reported a fault at 3pm on June 8th (06-08-2020), so to ensure we meet our SLA, we set the Latest Finish to 3pm on June 9th (06-09-2020).
Now when we schedule the job via drag and drop or Smart Scheduler we can rest assured that the SLA will be respected.
Deadlines
Maintenance Schedules
Time windows are a key aspect of maintenance work. Contractual obligations require that the work be carried out at specified intervals. However low profit margins mean we don’t want to incur a heavy cost serving maintenance jobs, so ideally they should be picked up by a technician who is already in the vicinity carrying out higher-value work.
Take quarterly maintenance for example - if we wait until the last week of the quarter to carry out those jobs, we will incur high travel costs, and possibly overtime, as we frantically try to meet our obligations.
Setting a broad job time window is a great way to give planners flexibility when scheduling, while ensuring contractual obligations are met.
In the example below, preventive maintenance work must be performed once per quarter.
The planner has set the job time window for the last month of the quarter (June). This ensures the job appears on the planner’s radar in plenty of time so that they can find the most suitable time.
Additional Details
Date Filters in Jobs List and Unassigned List
The Date Filters in the Jobs List and the Scheduler Unassigned List take a job’s time window into account. If the list’s date interval overlaps with a job’s time window, then it will appear in the results.
In the example below, the Jobs List date range (April 28th-30th) overlaps with the time window (April 30th - May 14th).
The Scheduler Unassigned List follows the same behavior.
Scheduled Quotes
Scheduled Quotes can be given a time window. Scheduled Quotes appear in the Jobs List and obey the date filtering rules outlined above.
Relationship between Job Time Windows and a job’s Scheduled Date & Time
A fundamental system setting in FieldAware is that all jobs must have a Scheduled Date & Time. This means that when you set a Job Time Window on a job, it will also receive a single timeslot by default.
However, this can be ignored when scheduling using drag-and-drop. If a time window has been set, the Scheduler rules will guide you to respect the time window settings.
Policy Violations and Approvals
Unlike violations of rules around skills, location permits, etc., scheduling a job outside its time window does not trigger an approval step. This is because Job Time Windows are not configurable under Scheduling Policies.