Defining slot groups

A slot group is a collection of service slots. A service slot is defined as a period of time against which service item promising can be made.

You can define multiple slots and slot groups, enabling you to schedule appointments of different granularity for different resource pools. For example, you may want to associate a slot group comprised of service slots that promise four-hour windows with a delivery service resource pool, and a slot group comprised of service slots that promise two-hour windows with a provided service resource pool.

The slots within a slot group can be defined at different levels of hierarchy. The hierarchical slot group may be comprised of parent slots and subsequent child slots. For example, if a full day slot is considered as the parent slot, the morning and afternoon slots within the full day slot are considered child slots. The child slot itself can be branched to a number of successive child slots. For example, the morning slot can be divided into AM1 and AM2 and the afternoon slot in PM1 and PM2.

Within a slot group, slots can overlap when the capacity is maintained at the resource pool level. For example, if a parent slot extends from 08:00 to 18:00, the child slots can be between 08:00 to 13:00 and 12:00 to 18:00, and so forth.

The slot group associated with a resource pool maintains the capacity at the service resource level and does not allow overlapping of slots at the same level in the hierarchy. For example, a slot group that has a full day slot at the parent level and a morning and afternoon slots as its child slots.

For more information about associating a slot group with a resource pool, see Defining resource pools.