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Universal Resource Scheduling (URS) enables organizations to schedule interactions between customers and company resources. For scenarios where the customer is expected to travel to the company's location, the facility scheduling feature can coordinate physical spaces and related resources.

ACS Facility Scheduler is a hosted, centralized scheduling tool designed specifically to expand and meet the multiple needs of organizations and their facilities. With this scheduling solution, you can create and distribute custom calendars to your members and staff so that rooms and resources are never double-booked.

Typical examples include:

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Facility Scheduler is a web-based calendar and scheduling solution designed specifically to help manage your facilities. For more details, see the ACS Facility Scheduler User Guide.
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Reserving a physical space

Reserve a room for an event or party
Reserve a room for an exercise class
Reserve a bay at a mechanic shop
Reserve a boat

Reserving an appointment with a person at a facility

Laptop repair at a Microsoft retail store
Wealth management consultation at bank branch
Doctor's office with related nurse and doctor

In this topic, we'll explore a few example scenarios using facility scheduling, and describe how it's used in each.

Prerequisites

Universal Resource Scheduling (URS) v3.0
Field Service v8.0 (for work orders, if applicable)

In general, to use facility scheduling, an administrator must create a facility resource (with or without additional related resources), configure a requirement that calls for facility resources, book the requirement, and view facility resources and booking(s) on the schedule board.

Let's consider five scenarios to describe facility scheduling:

Schedule a facility
Schedule a facility with 5 generic rooms
Schedule a facility and related resource
Schedule a facility with 5 specific rooms
Schedule a facility with 5 specific rooms and 5 related resources

Scenario 1: Schedule a facility

In this scenario, schedulers want to search for nearby doctors' offices and schedule an appointment for a patient to arrive at the doctor's office.

We will configure this scenario by creating a facility resource to represent the doctor's office, creating a requirement to represent the patient's request for an appointment at a nearby facility, and then booking the appointment and viewing the facility and booking on the schedule board.

1. Create a facility resource

First, navigate to Universal Resource Scheduling > Resources and create a facility resource with the following attributes.

Resource Type = Facility
Start/end location = Organizational Unit Address
1. Since a facility represents a physical space, the fields 'start location' and 'end location' must be set to Organizational Unit Address.
2. The parent organizational unit must have a latitude and longitude that represents the location of the facility. This allows the schedule assistant to consider the Facility’s location when displaying available results.
Display on Schedule Board = Yes
Enable for Availability Search = Yes
(Optional) Enter working hours
(Optional) Add related characteristics, territory, resource roles, etc. to distinguish facility resources from other facilities and resources. For example, if a doctor's office has X-ray equipment, 'X-Ray' can be added as a characteristic to the facility resource. This can influence which facility resources are filtered and displayed on the schedule board or which facility resources are returned during a schedule assistant search.

2. Create a requirement for a facility

Next, create a requirement that calls for a facility resource.

Navigate to Universal Resource Scheduling > Requirement Groups > +New. Configure the following fields.

Enter a Name
Enter From and To dates
Set a Duration

Highlight the requirement and select Open Form, then set the Resource Type field to Facility, which accomplishes the following:
1. It filters schedule assistant results by only showing resources with the chosen types (User, Account, Contact, Equipment, Pool, Crew, or in this case, Facility).
2. This means the requirement requires a facility resource to be fulfilled and ensures the schedule assistant search results return facility type resources (as opposed to personnel or equipment).
3. It maps to the resource type field on the resource entity.
4. Note that if this field is left empty, all resources are searched.

Set Work Location to Facility, which means:
1. The interaction will take place at the scheduled facility and factors into travel time and distance calculations. Find more details in the configuration considerations section of this article.
Enter latitude and longitude.
1. These values are typically entered manually or through workflows.
2. These values represent the customer's location and are used to display facilities relative to the customer's location in schedule assistant results. This is not the facility's location, as that is taken from the organizational unit of the facility type resource.

3. Book the requirement

After creating a facility resource and a requirement that calls for a facility, you can schedule the facility. Requirements that are part of a group can be scheduled via the Book button to trigger the schedule assistant, but not through drag and drop. Facility requirements not part of a group (single requirements) can be manually dragged and dropped to a facility on the schedule board or by using the schedule assistant.

The schedule assistant considers availability of resources as well as other set requirement constraints, such as characteristics, organizational units, categories, etc.

Select Book from the requirement or requirement group form, as seen in the following screenshot.

Facility travel time and distance calculations in the preceding schedule assistant example represent the time and distance between the facility resource (as defined by the location of the related organizational unit) and the customer's location (as defined by the latitude and longitude values on the requirement). The schedule assistant's radius filter filters based on this travel calculation.

Filtering work location to location agnostic will remove travel time and distance calculations from schedule assistant results.

4. Add the facility resource to the schedule board

Scheduling a facility is just like scheduling any other resource. You can drag and drop requirements to create bookings; you can drag existing bookings to change the time or resource; or you can use the schedule assistant to help sift through the list of facilities based on availability and other constraints.

To view facility resources on the schedule board, filter by resource type and/or organizational units.

Facility resources will also be displayed on the schedule board map based on the location of the related organizational unit.

Scenario 2: Schedule a facility with 5 generic rooms

In this scenario, a doctor's office has 5 identical rooms and schedulers don't need to book each room specifically. They must, however, ensure that no more than 5 patients are booked across all rooms during any one time slot.

We will configure this scenario by adding a capacity to a facility resource.

1. Create a facility resource

See scenario 1 in this article to create a facility resource, or select an existing facility resource record.

From the facility

Acs Facility Scheduler For Mac