Optimize to Goals: The Technology

Service businesses vary in their preferences and objectives. In other words, they vary on their views of what is a good schedule: Is it one that emphasizes productivity? One that focuses on service quality and customer satisfaction? Minimizing costs such as overtime and travel? Employee satisfaction? ClickSchedule supports many KPIs that can be used to measure each of the above as well as other metrics, and additional KPIs may be configured as needed.

As always, it’s a matter of finding the right balance. So all we need to do is to tell the optimization engine how to balance between the KPIs, right? Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. It turns out that there are real-world limits to how far you can increase productivity, or reduce overtime, no matter how you set the balance. Another, bigger difficulty comes from the unexpected interactions: Setting the balance to reduce overtime, for example, may cause travel time to increase (depending on scheduling rules, task distribution across the service region and across the day, and much more). Therefore, trying to balance by setting the relative strength of each KPI is at worst pure guesswork, and at best an art rather than a science.

To take the guesswork out of "schedule tuning" – that is, finding the right balance – ClickSoftware came up with a unique patent-pending technology called "Optimize to Goals". It is a combination of automatic self-guided search for balance with interactive and iterative user dialog: The dialog captures the user's preferences at each stage of the iteration, by showing the user the obtained KPI values as well as the actual generated schedule in map and Gantt view. The user can then indicate to the algorithm which KPIs should receive a higher emphasis, possibly at the expense of some other KPIs. The algorithm now returns to self-guided mode to search for the best balance that matches the user's guidance. This may uncover new opportunities for finding an even better balance, leading to repeating the process. A key characteristic of this process is that the user is always made aware of the achievable limits: For example, knowing that the currently proposed tuning can achieve utilization of 82% is far less useful than knowing this fact plus one more fact: that under any other tuning it is not possible to go higher than 84% utilization. By showing the achievable ranges for each KPI at each iteration, and showing how the achievable ranges change as the user narrows down the allowable values for other KPIs, the tuning process becomes short, understandable and realistic, tested on real data and producing schedules tuned to the organization's goals.

Optimize to Goals: The Methodology and Service

The "Optimize to Goals" technology is a key part of the tools used in ClickSoftware's Schedule Optimization Tuning consulting service. This service combines the self-guided and interactive tuning technology together with business analysis, process analysis and experience in hundreds of challenging optimization-tuning engagements to help the service organization achieve finely-tuned schedules, with consistent schedule quality and significantly reduced need for manual intervention in the scheduling process.