ZUGSEIL Service Scheduling (SRS)

Scheduling appointments between supplier or customer is a major task of the procurement process chains handled in the ZUGSEIL BEST Shop (BS) , but are also required in maintenanace of products which is handled in the ZUGSEIL BEST Lifecycle Management (LCM) service bundle. By nature it concerns two parties - the party offering the appointments, which needs to make sure that the resources required for perfoming the services provided at an appointment are available, and the consumer which has to reserve the time for appointment in which the services are performed.

Supplier side

When selling products over the b-op plattform to customers, each supplier has the option define service products, which can be used in these contexts

Standalone service product

These are products, which represent a standalone service. Service scheduling is triggered, when the service product is marked with the tag "requires an appointment" (yes/no) for fulfilling this service (e.g. appointments in medical practises or product maintenance stations). The "appointment making" may be defined as ignore / mandatory / optional. For any answer other than "ignore", a list of appointment types matching the service product should be selected.

Bundled service product

A product can be marked a product bundle (formerly set articles). This means that it does not exist as physical product, but consists of a set of products. Product bundles are distributed over the regular regular b-op catalog server process. A product bundle may contain other products, which may even cascades through product bundles containing other product bundles. Each product bundle may also contain service products, with these service specific settings

• pre-order / post-order service - these services may require an appointment for gathering further production details (Preproduction Appointments) and/or products which require personal handover to customer (Postproduction Appointments)
• require an appointment override (yes/no) - this is already defined at the service product, but may be overriden at each bundle to avoid double appointment making.
• mandatory / optional / ignore - is this service optional or mandatory

Customer side

If such products are procured through the ZUGSEIL BEST Shop (BS) or ZUGSEIL BEST Lifecycle Management (LCM) the supplier might trigger

Scheduling Scenarios

All these scheduling scenarios are supported by the ZUGSEIL BEST Shop extension "Service Scheduling" (BS-SES).

Service Products

In this scenarion the product is the service, which requires the customer and the supplier to meet as part of fulfillment.

Preproduction Appointments

The production of the process requires an appointment to take place where product details are captured which make sure that the customer gets exactly what is desired.

Postproduction Appointments

After the production an appointment is made to fit and/or handover the product to the customer.

Appointment Creation process

The basic form of appointment making is based on slots offered to the customer. The customer only filters which appointment fits his schedule the best based on the start and duration date of the appointment.

Still for some scenarios the customer wants to filter by:

• location, where the service is offered,
• or by staff performing the service or a part of the service.