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 supplier party offering the appointments, which needs to make sure that the resources required for perfoming the services are available. And the consumer side, which has to reserve the time for appointment in which the services are performed. This negotiation process typically is happening through b-op real-time communication facilitated by the Appointment-broker b-op connector.

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/pickup 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

Process-stages

The appointment-making can happen on two stages of the procurement process:

• Pre-Procurement appointment selection (service products) - To order standalone service products (which require appointment-making), the appointment is made by the user during the procurement process directly in the ZUGSEIL BEST Shop (BS).

• Post-Procurement appointment making (regular products with bundled services) - If budled service products are procured through the ZUGSEIL BEST Shop (BS) or ZUGSEIL BEST Lifecycle Management (LCM) the supplier digital might trigger pre and/or post-production appointment scheduling requests, which notifies the customer that he has an appointment to be defined, together with a set of potential appointments for the customer.

Appointment selection process

When potential appointment slots are proposed, the user wants to find the next matching appointment quickly. This filtering typically happens over:

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

Related articles

• ZUGSEIL BEST Shop (BS)
• ZUGSEIL BEST Lifecycle Management (LCM)

Related technical articles

• Service Scheduling - Technical Overview
• Appointment Resource Abstraction Service
• Appointment Making API Service