Real-time scenarios? What’s that? Optimized long-term planning horizons? Goal-driven economic modeling? Hey. It’s not the kind of language you’ll hear from our competitors. They aren’t there yet. After all, the Pointserve idea was born in the American space program and only later evolved into a multi-layered solution for such worldly things as the service supply chain. We admit our Optimization Platform and suite of optimization engines aren’t easy to explain in normal language. But we believe we do a pretty good job of it. We may not turn you into an astronaut in an afternoon...but we can probably make you a major fan of our technology.

Since our solutions use goal-driven economic modeling rather than rules-based, you can quickly and easily arrange and rearrange your objectives without the endless hassle of managing complex and inflexible rule-driven operations.

Pointserve’s Optimization Platform comprises the following six engines:

		Forecasting Engine This engine uses historical job data and a range of advanced algorithms to forecast the volume, type and geographic distribution of service demands for any future date. Over time, the work history progressively enhances the accuracy of the forecasting models.
		Multi-Day Planning Engine This engine performs multiple planning functions to optimally manage large amounts of future work across any time period, including: (1) constructing and assigning service teams; (2) creating optimized territories; (3) optimally assigning technicians to territories, and (4) optimally distributing work across the available resources, respecting all constraints including complex recurring visit patterns.
		Appointment Scheduling Engine This engine ranks available customer appointment windows based on the forecast workload, actual resource availability and a full range of cost and value factors. Forecast orders are dynamically replaced with real jobs as the work comes in, ensuring that fully optimized appointment times are presented for each new service request.
		Resource Scheduling Engine Firstly this engine optimally assigns specific resources to firm customer appointments. As a second stage, the engine can optimally insert maintenance orders from a pool of work that is automatically aged based on SLA requirements. Finally, the engine optimally sequences all the jobs for a given resource to create optimized routes and detailed schedules.
		Real-Time Engine This engine optimally manages any same-day changes that need to be made to customer appointment times and resource schedules resulting from real-time events, including: (1) unavailable resources; (2) visits canceled; (3) emergency work orders; (4) vehicles break downs; (5) parts shortages; (6) extended job durations; and (7) extended drive times. The Real-Time Engine optimally inserts, removes, and redistributes jobs as required.
		GIS Engine The Geographical Information System (GIS) engine performs four main functions: (1) Geo-locating service addresses; (2) Calculating point-to-point drive times and distances. (3) Creating street level maps and turn-by-turn drive directions; (4) Generating a “travel matrix” of the minimum times and distances between each service stop and any other potential “next” stop. This travel matrix is used as a feed into the other engines.

Powering the Application Modules

Together, these six optimization engines effectively provide a full suite of Optimization Services to power both Pointserve and third party applications. These Optimization Services are accessed via XML messages making them ideally suited for a hosted “on-demand” environment.