Posts Tagged ‘rcd’

Sneak Peak Field Service 12.1.2

Friday, October 30th, 2009

I got an invitation the other day to take a tour around Field Service 12.1.2. Last Tuesday I spent an hour with my contact in India who showed me what was coming up. To say the least: I was impressed. So many things that are lacking nowadays and actually costing the business money are now solved. The Gantt-chart has been revamped (but is still not maximizable, alas) and basically gives the dispatcher much more control and information. There’s no need to open source-documents to adjust any SR or task information, you can do most in the Gantt itself. Just search for a task, locate it on the plan board or Gantt and adjust any values while you’re at it. You can even create (personal) tasks within the Gantt.

The most impressive thing I saw was the new Scheduler Rules UI. This is just genious. You know all these profiles for Scheduler and cost parameters which you enter in some shady form deep within the Field Service responsibility? Well, from now on all (yes all) parameters have been put on one form, Oracle even introduced some new cost factors. What’s even better: They made it “flexible”. You can have cost options / profiles on 6 different levels: site, application, responsibility, user, territory and resource. Consider this for a moment.

For example, you can put all the contractors in one territory, assign rediculously high cost factors, so internal employees will always have the benefit when scheduling. Only when there’s really no other option, external contractors will be used. Another way to do this is to use newly introduced stand-by shifts (comes with a cost factor as well). Just schedule everything to the regular shifts and if you’re understaffed at some point, a stand-by shift (e.g. contractor) is considered as well. The decision to hire contractors has always been a manual one, but now Scheduler can make it for you.

I remember having a live demo at Oracle-NL a few years back. They showed us 12.0.0 Field Service. The customer I was with at the time was using 11.5.9. The whole experience was pretty disappointing then, since there were no real significant improvements (at least for this customer). To me it seems that Oracle has caught up with the demands from the customers and is finally investing in this module. It’s starting to look great.

If you want to read through all changes in the next release, check the release content document (rcd) for 12.1.x on metalink (doc id 561580.1)

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in oracle | No Comments »

Oracle Field Service

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

I’m neck-deep in a Field Service implementation. I’ve got a sort of love-hate relationship with this module. For companies Oracle Field Service is hardly ever the reason to choose Oracle EBS, but mostly it’s good enough to use. That’s something I have to live with and explain a lot. Usually companies choose Oracle EBS for financials, for CRM or just because everyone in the (vertical) market uses it. Field Service is then usually used because of its integration possibilities. You have to admit: integration is one of the better aspect of this module.

In a previous project I tried to think of as much reasons why Oracle Field Service was NOT the module they should use – some of them were:

  • absolutely no way of assigning tasks in bulk to external engineers without creating dummy engineers and still keep an eye on availability of these external engineers
  • the incredibly hard way for employees to trade shifts
  • the inability called Gantt chart (I can write a book about the inabilities of the Gantt)

In the current project, the business case is totally different. A lot less field employees, a lot of different skills and tight travel schemes. And actually I’m thinking: this project might be a very good fit for Field Service. Yes, there are external resources, but they need to have very specific skills and they have to do some kind of intake before they are allowed to be hired (I guess). But still there are some aspects that Oracle can’t handle. For example: Oracle can’t handle flexible constraints like “max of 10 hours a day of work+travel” or “if there are still internal resources available, use them instead of external resources”. The latter seems possible, but the scheduler first qualifies all the resources based on territory criteria and then checks availability. There’s no cost factor for external resources (enhancement request / bug nr = 6878526) unfortunately.

Talking about enhancements: I’ve logged enhancements for two ‘opposites’: the opposite of skills called inabilities (bug no 8203169) and the opposite of preferred resources, with the very inspiring name ‘unpreferred resources’ (bug no 8203096). Both sound very logical to me, because how else to deal with employees with allergies? Or employees who messed up at a customer, meaning sending that person again would lower customer satisfaction?

Now I’m thinking hard on how to optimize the current implementation, not only in the application but also in the organization. And I’m looking forward to 12.1 which promises more advanced scheduler optimization possibilities (RCD metalink note 561580.1). Yes, Field Service takes up a lot of my time, even while not working billable hours. Guess that’s a good thing, or is it? ;-)

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in oracle | 3 Comments »