Access the resource exclude-list in Policy Designer Field Service Management

[paulThink180]

Hello FSM Consultants,

my question is around where/how and if you can access the resource exclude-list under the standard Rules when making Policies for the Auto-Schedule. When making business rules for auto-scheduling, the Re-Optimization API is used. Going by the documentation there should be a resource exclusion list but I cannot find it in the data-model, or in the Query API or anywhere else in the help documentation.

Also, it cannot be found in the Optimization Data Model ?

Does anyone know how to access it?

If you open the auto-generated JSON file below, you can see its reference but how do you access?

Thanks so much,

Paul

[former_member849727 · Accepted solution]

Hi Paul,

This rule was built based on legacy logic from the Crowd functionality. Essentially, if a technician rejected an activity from the mobile app, a field on the activity got updated to include this technician's ID.

Note: It was possible to fill that field using a business rule or an ERP connector without making use of the Crowd functionality.

Adding the rule "Resource is not excluded" to a policy led to the following behavior:
If the rule identified a technician's ID in that field at run-time, then the rule would return "false", and the technician got excluded.

A few months ago, we introduced a new rule called "Job respects resource inclusion or exclusion list". I recommend you look into it and use that one instead. It covers 100% of the functionality that was covered by the other rule and you are in full control over the name of the UDF and which object you would like to place it on (e.g., Activity, BusinessPartner, Equipment).

[paulThink180 · Accepted solution]

Fantastic Florian,

this was very helpful, I am working on that rule now and yes that will fulfil the requirement.

thanks so much

[former_member849727]

Hello Gopalakrishnan,

I came across your question and can provide the following tips to you:

There is a problem in the configuration of the business rule, which is why the rule fails to be executed. We analysed your support request and noticed that the OAUTH client you defined in the rule has no access to the company where you run your rule. You must change the configuration of the OAUTH client to make it work. Read more on the topic: Generating Client ID and Secret

In addition to that, the policy rule "Job respects resource inclusion or exclusion list" is not configured correctly. In the parameter "UDF name", you must provide the name of a User-defined field located on an object such as the technician, business partner, equipment, activity, etc. However, you provided a list of technician IDs instead. Sadly, that does not work.

Instead, please create a UDF on an object where it makes sense. My advice for this rule would be to define technicians who are allowed to work with a business partner or a piece of equipment, either of these two objects.
Based on my experience, it does not make sense to define the list of allowed technicians for each technician because that would be a massive duplication of data, which is terrible for maintenance and integration reasons. After all, every update to the list must be propagated to each person representing a technician.

In your use case, the following approaches are more promising:

1. If you want to auto-schedule only selected technicians out of the total of technicians, then you should filter the technicians already in the business rule by only sending relevant technician IDs to the auto-scheduler. You could achieve that by, e.g., maintaining a user-defined field called "Relevant technicians for auto-scheduling", containing a boolean value. In the business rule, select all the persons of type ERPUSER for which the UDF value equals true.
2. If you want to auto-schedule all technicians but apply a specific set of rules or objectives for selected technicians, and the list of technicians does not depend on the business partner, equipment or activity, then you should explore the following: create a UDF on the technician marking all the technicians that shall be considered. In the policy, use the rule "UDF - check for specific value" and provide the object and UDF name and check for value "true". Apply your rules and/or conditional objectives accordingly.

Please note that SAP offers an expert service for partners who are getting started with the topic of auto-scheduling. There is a cost attached to it, but in all cases in which this service was used, it had a very positive impact on both the project output and delivery time. Please get in touch with your SAP contact to learn more about this option.

[GopalakrishnanS]

Hi paulstuart, florian.glanzmann,
Good Day!
We are trying to use this rule "Job respects resource inclusion or exclusion list" to include only the required technicians are considered for auto scheduling in the custom optimization policy and same is referred in the custom business rule of auto-scheduling. The list of person.id mentioned in the rule is not considering and the jobs are assigned to other technicians.
Could you please share your thoughts to resolve this issue. Attached the screenshot of the rule used in the optimization policy by default the Boolean value is true which denotates the inclusion list of technicians.

custombrwithoptimizationpolicy.jpg

Best Regards,

Gopalakrishnan S.