Generation of Activity Proposals
As a part of activity scheduling, the system generates activity proposals for a specified set of business partners (for example, a visit plan), which are then displayed and stored in the activity calendar.
When you trigger generation of activity proposals, the system identifies the possible times at which activity proposals can be generated for the specified business partners and / or contact persons using the criteria defined.
The systems takes the business partners" visiting hours (optional) as well as the working hours and scheduling period into consideration, as maintained during activity scheduling.
Generation of activity proposals works as follows:
All activity proposals are created within the employee working hours within a given period of time. If there is no time slot in which activity proposals can be generated, an activity proposal is generated as an all-day event for the given day.
The sequence number is considered for business partners with no specified start time. Activity proposals for business partners with no start time, however, are generated by scanning through the entire day, and identifying slots which do not conflict with other existing activities.
If you have not specified the week number and weekday, the system identifies the first available free slot for an activity proposal in the scheduling period.
If an activity is planned for a business partner with a start time, the activity proposal is generated regardless of other activities at the same time.
If you have specified preparation time and the system cannot find a slot for both preparation time and the duration of the activity, it searches for and fills a slot only for the duration of the activity. This is then marked accordingly in the calendar. You can use colors to distinguish between different types and statues of activity proposals and activities in the calendar. .
If the system cannot find a time slot in which to generate activity proposals, an activity proposal is generated as an all-day event for that day.
If the scheduling period does not match the specified criteria, the system ignores all business partners and / or contact persons who are not within the scheduling period. For example, a visit plan contains five business partners, each of whom are to be scheduled on a separate weekday, for example, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. If the scheduling period is specified for a time frame of three days, for example, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the other two business partners (scheduled for Monday and Friday) are not considered for activity proposal generation.
If the scheduling period does not match the specified criteria, the system generates activity proposals for all business partners, or contact persons, or both on the specified days only once during the scheduling period. For example, a visit plan contains five business partners, each of who are to be scheduled on a separate weekday. If the scheduling period is specified for a time frame of ten days, the system generates activity proposals for each business partner once, that is, for the first five days, and no activity proposals are generated for the remaining days.
If the business partner and / or contact person is already booked for another activity within the scheduling period, the system still generates an activity proposal for this slot, but also reports a conflict.
Note
The system does not report a conflict if another activity is already scheduled for the required scheduling period. An activity proposal is still generated in addition to the existing activity.
The system does not take vacation into consideration when generating activity proposals. If the following two criteria are fulfilled, however, the system does take vacation into consideration:
The vacation is maintained as an activity
You have only specified sequence numbers for the activity proposals, and no start times