In March, we have been focusing on optimizing different parts of Previsto's scheduling logic. The fruit of this is that the automatic scheduling will react faster, scheduling will automatically be further optimized every night and we can optimize the logic even more in the future.
Faster automatic scheduling
Previsto can optimize scheduling across all employees in the company based on employee working hours, customer preferred visit times and much more. However, it often requires millions of calculations to calculate just one week of work for one company - and this has been noticeable for larger companies. We have therefore made an adjustment to make scheduling significantly faster for day-to-day work.
The following sketches explain how we have planned so far and what we have adjusted it to.
Before, the whole week would be optimized when a task was changed
Now, only the days involved are rescheduled when a task is changed
Because the system now only reschedules the working days that have been changed, we achieve a much faster optimization of the schedule. There are also fewer surprises while working because tasks are not suddenly moved to other workdays while working on the system.
However, there are some optimizations that need to be made across the week in order to optimize driving routes, which are described in the following section.
Additional optimization every night
To ensure we can continue to deliver optimized routes across all employees and nearby workdays, it is necessary to run scheduling across entire weeks at a time. To use as much processing power as possible and avoid moving tasks around without interfering with you as a user working on the system, we now run powerful optimizations of your plan at night, as described in the following sketch.
Prepared for the future
The adjustments we've made pave the way for further improvements in the future. One example is a better distribution of work when the dates of appointments/tasks are flexible and a period with a lot of vacation or holidays is approaching.
With nightly scheduling, we can work towards scheduling for longer periods at a time to better distribute work, as shown in the following sketch.
In the future, we will be able to plan across multiple weeks at once
Feedback
If you have any input or feedback on our planning adjustments or on Previsto in general, you are always welcome to write to us at support@previsto.com.