Service resources

A service resource in Sterling™ Order Management System is used to define one or more people that work as a team, and is represented as a single entity that performs provided or delivery services.

Each resource has a calendar associated with it by either selecting one of the calendars defined by the ship node or its primary enterprise or using the shipping calendar of a node. This shipping calendar can be defined by the node or inherited from the primary enterprise of the node. Each service resource is associated with a single resource pool.

Skills and regions are defined at the resource pool level, and the resource pool calendar is also used in addition to the calendar of the resource.

This feature allows you to allocate resources at the time of appointment booking. For example, jobs that require multiple visits require the same resource to be booked for multiple days. Also, custom tasks where the skills required to perform the task are much more difficult to model systematically also need resource scheduling to be done. In this case, the scheduler takes into account the unique requirements for the job when selecting the resource.

Additionally, you can associate team members with a service resource in the Applications Manager, as long as those users are defined at the level of the node that owns the service resource. The team members can then be associated with appointments on service work orders.

The capacity, consumption, and availability of a service resource or resource pool which maintains capacity at resource level are always calculated and stored in hours regardless of the capacity unit of measure of the resource pool.