Use the Workforce Scheduling ASAP objective to instruct the scheduling engine to prioritize scheduling an appointment at the earliest possible time. Scheduling appointments as soon as possible improves customer satisfaction and SLA adherence and allows for a more utilized schedule with less resource idle time. This objective is relevant for field scheduling only.
Required Editions
| Available in: Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Enterprise and Unlimited Editions |
This objective prioritizes scheduling an appointment as early as possible within the appointment’s earliest-start and due-date window. It grades earlier slots higher than later ones. Use this objective to fill schedule gaps and cut the elapsed time between appointment creation and completion.
Include the ASAP objective in a scheduling policy and define a weight to control how much the scheduling engine prefers scheduling an appointment to an earlier date or time over other scheduling preferences, such as minimizing travel time. When you use the ASAP objective to prioritize scheduling an appointment at the earliest possible date or time, consider also how its weighting affects other scheduling goals (service objectives).
The earliest date or time an appointment can be scheduled is represented as the latest value of either the current date or time, the appointment’s earliest start permitted date or time, the appointment arrival window start time, or the optimization horizon start time (when you’re using an optimization service). This value represents the earliest logical time the appointment can be scheduled. The ASAP objective scores earlier scheduling options higher than later ones.
For example, consider an appointment with
- Earliest Start Date: January 1, 2024, at 8:00 AM
- Due Date: January 30, 2024, at 8:00 PM
The current time is January 7, 2024, at 12:00 PM, and the optimization horizon is from January 10, 2024, at 5:00 AM to January 17, 2024, at 5:00 AM.
In this scenario, the earliest time the optimizer can schedule the appointment is the start of the optimization horizon on January 10, 2024, at 5:00 AM. Assuming all other factors remain the same, scheduling an appointment at this time receives a higher score than scheduling an appointment on January 10, 2024, at 6:00 AM.
The ASAP objective is graded on a scale of 0 to 30 days in the future, where the earliest date/time described in the example is considered as 0. Understanding this scale is important when you consider the weighting of this objective relative to other objectives. For example, scheduling an appointment 1 day in the future versus 28 days has a significant difference on the 0 to 30 day scale. However, if all your appointments have 2-hour appointment windows, scheduling an appointment earlier in the 2-hour appointment window versus later in the appointment window has a less pronounced difference on the 0 to 30 day scale.
Using the 0 to 30 day scale, each minute that an appointment is scheduled after the earliest possible scheduled time is penalized, even minutes greater than the 30-day scale. The penalty is calculated as X minutes divided by the 30-day scale (30 days × 24 hours per day × 60 minutes per hour). The total penalty points are multiplied by the weight of the ASAP objective in the scheduling policy used to contribute to the resulting score of the schedule for that appointment.
This calculation can be used to equate to the penalty per minute of added travel time in the Minimize Travel Time objective.