Corporate Resource Booking

OPTI-TIME can be deployed as an organisation wide resource booking system, tightly integrated into CRM platforms, web portals and / or existing back office applications.

Examples of applications include;

  • Housing Officers
  • Bulky Waste collections
  • Pest Control
  • Home Care
  • Pitch / court bookings
  • Room bookings
  • Registry Services

There can be significant IT benefits from having a single solution to meet the whole spectrum of resource booking needs, and OPTI-TIME has the flexibility to provide the right solution to each requirement.

Every Council has a huge range of services that need some form of booking system. Some of these are relatively simple and the numbers of resources can be small, at the other end of the spectrum there can be hundreds or even thousands of resources travelling around all day, often to specific agreed appointment times, all needing managing and optimising.

From Inspections and Repairs (of anything) to Social Services, Bulky Waste Uplifts to Needs Assessment interviews, significant benefits can be realised through the introduction of intelligent resource scheduling.

To date, Councils have implemented OPTI-TIME primarily within the very complex environment of Housing Repairs – seeing dramatic results both financially and in terms of customer service. Scheduling is sometimes considered for other complex areas, such as school pick-ups or home care visits, but the smaller or simpler services are completely left out – it is incredibly difficult to make a business case for investing in scheduling technology for half a dozen resources.

OPTI-TIME offers the opportunity to implement a Council-wide corporate resource booking system; something sophisticated enough to drive efficiencies from the most complex environments but simple enough so that it makes it easier to run and administer even very basic booking requirements.

The system will typically pay for itself many times over in the complex services, leaving the Council with a paid for system that can then be deployed into any other service. The scale and nature of benefits will obviously vary by service, but there is potential to utilise resources more effectively in almost every case, and along with service improvements the marginal cost of rolling the solution out to each service suddenly makes clear financial sense.

Booking, rostering, scheduling and dynamic scheduling

A booking is generally something straight-forward, a meeting room, sports pitch or interview being typical examples. The focus of a booking system is on the booking interaction with basic rules to control what can be booked and the benefits come from streamlining the booking process and / or extending the process to a wider audience, with self-service becoming a core requirement for councils.

Rostering is generally applied to large workforces and making sure the right numbers and types of people are working at any point in time. The focus of the system is on managing shift patterns and making it easy to change when people are working at short notice. The benefits come again from streamlined processes, reducing the administrative load associated with running the service, and can also come from service improvements if the previous manual process led to mistakes and lack of cover. Home care is one of the best examples of a service having this requirement.

Scheduling is used rather loosely to imply greater sophistication than is often the case, but in general scheduling means the ability to define complex allocation rules and a capability to produce an optimised plan for a defined time period. Scheduling may or may not have a travel planning capability for mobile resources. The focus of the system here is around the optimisation rules and algorithms and the system’s ability to help deliver efficiency improvements through better planning.

Finally, Dynamic Scheduling implies a system that schedules according to the definition above, but that does this continually and in real-time based on ever changing inputs. This last capability is what has led to OPTI-TIME being the de-facto solution of choice for all housing repairs organisations; multi-skilled mobile workforces delivering a service where job duration is unknown but all work is appointed and the need to achieve both first time completion and keep all appointments underpins everything that is done.

Only with OPTI-TIME is it possible to deliver all of the above capabilities from a single system – sophisticated enough to handle the complex, simple enough to make simple bookings easier.

Benefits

• Optimised use of resources across all council services
• More reactive customer service
• Reduced travel costs
• Standardised IT solution
• Reduced system administration costs
• Reduced system integration costs
• Standardised booking interface across all services
• Self-service enablement across all services