Service Arrangements for Service Providers

The service arrangement contains resource details for the service provider, which the system uses to identify matches for demands. You can create more than one service arrangement for a service provider. For example, you can create a series of service arrangements for a service provider, each with specific availability and qualifications.

Prerequisites

You have made all necessary settings in CRM Customizing, by choosing Customer Relationship Management Workforce Deployment WFD Server Business Settings for WFD Server Resource Settings . To do so, you have maintained the following Customizing activities in detail:

Define Service Areas
Define Job Functions and Levels
Define Availability Templates
Define Overtime Limit Profile
Define Capacity Limit Profile

If you want to add qualifications to the service arrangement, you have defined them in CRM Customizing, by choosing Customer Relationship Management Workforce Deployment Service Resource Planning Qualification Management .

Features

You can enter the following information to define the service arrangement:

Assignment Block	Details
General Data	Name, type, and ID of the arrangement.
Validity	The validity period of the arrangement.
Location	The address of the service provider to which the individual business partner is assigned.
Capacity	The time that the service provider has available for allocations. You see this assignment block only when you select the capacity types Equally Distributed or Overall.
Service Area	The primary and alternative service areas to which a service provider can be assigned.
Qualification	The service provider's qualifications, and the proficiency level for each qualification.
Availability	The days and times when the service provider can be scheduled to meet a demand. These times can be: Automatically retrieved by the system from an availability template Detached from a template and changed for the resource Manually entered
Change History	A list of changes made to the service arrangement data.

Activities

When adding a new service arrangement, you define the availability boundaries, that is the capacity, as either:

Working Time Based
The working time is based on the availability of the resource.
Equally Distributed

The work is equally distributed to each interval of a service arrangement. For example, a week with a total capacity of 60 hours is distributed as follows:
- Monday, 8:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m., 12 hours
- Tuesday, 8:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m., 12 hours
- Wednesday, 8:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m., 12 hours
- Thursday, 8:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m., 12 hours
- Friday, 8:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m., 12 hours
Overall
The working time is based on the total capacity for the service arrangement and multiple availability intervals, and is not distributed.

The difference between Equally Distributed and Overall is based on capacity and calculation of remaining availability when scheduling and creating manual assignments.

For service arrangements with equally distributed capacity, the system does not allow more than the specified capacity, and so the capacity is distributed equally for all time intervals.
For service arrangements with overall capacity, the total capacity within the service arrangement is the limit for an error message. Using the example above, on Monday morning at 8:00 a.m. it is possible to create 60 concrete assignments with a duration of one hour each, and an unknown number of people. The creation of a 61st assignment anywhere within the assignment and availability time range would result in an error message, because of a violation of the total capacity limit of the resource.