Business hour definitions

The business hours scheduler provides a way to define the open and close times at locations (customers and sites) and the start and end times for transportation assets in your model for each day of the week. Business hours act as constraints on when locations are open and assets can be in use. If you do not define business hours for days in the week, locations are considered open and assets can be in continuous use for that entire day. See Closing a location or asset for a day.

Create business hours

1. Open the Business Hours table.
2. Click Scheduler.
3. Click Add, then select an entity. This will be a customer, site, asset, customer filter or group, site filter or group, or asset filter or group. Click OK. You see the Business Hour Scheduler.
4. You can repeat step 3 to add other locations or assets as needed.
5. If you have added more than one entity, click on the entity name in the left-hand list.
6. You can use Batch Add to create the same time segment for multiple days or you can add time segments individually on the schedule.
7. For batch adding of time segments:
   • Enter the hours and minutes defining the start of the segment. For example, enter 08:30 for 8:30 am.
   • Enter the hours and minutes defining the end of the segment. For example, enter 18:00 for 6:00 pm.
   • Select/de-select the check boxes for the days of the week for which the time segment should be created. For example, you can uncheck the selections for Sunday and Saturday if the time segments apply only to the 5 standard work days. When no time segments are defined for a day, the location is considered open or the asset can be in use all day.
   • Click Add. The segments are populated on the schedule.
8. For the additional of individual time segments:
   • Double-click on the day of the week at the approximate start or end time of the segment. You see a one-hour segment.
   • Drag the left-hand side of the segment to adjust the start time.
   • Drag the right-hand side of the segment to adjust the end time.
9. To delete an individual time segment, click on the delete icon (x) at the top right of a segment. You are asked to confirm the deletion.
10. To delete an entity and all schedule currently defined in the scheduler, click delete next to the entity name.
11. Once all schedule information is defined, click OK. Based on the number of entities and number of time segments defined, one or more records are added to the Business Hours table.

Once you have created Business Hours records, you can use the scheduler to review and update them. Click Scheduler, then select the entity you want to review. The time segments defined for that entity are displayed on the calendar.

Closing a location or asset for a day

If no specific time segment is defined for a location or asset on a day of the week, that location/asset is considered open/available for the entire day. This is the case when the open time is 00:00 and close time for the day is 23:59.

For example, DC_Atlanta is open 6 days a week and closed on Sunday. Each of the open days has two time segments (the location is closed in the middle of the day). In order to close the location on Sunday, the records would look like the following, with Sunday Closed set to 00:01 on both records:

Close a location or asset

1. In the Business Hours table, identify the day for which you want to close the entity.
2. Enter 00:00 for the open time and 00:01 for the close time for that day.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for each day to close and for each record that applies to the entity.

Modeling business hours for assets

You can model driver shifts and driver working days and hours using business hours. These cases include:

• Making an asset unavailable on specific days.
• Making an asset available only during a specific time window within a day.
• Modeling driver shifts to restricting routes to certain time windows.

Case 1: Make an asset unavailable on specific days

In this case, the asset is unavailable on Sunday, but available for the full day on Monday. The Business Hours record would have the following definition for those days.

Case 2: Make an asset available during a specific time window

The asset in this case is available from 8 AM to 6 PM on Sunday, and from 9 AM to 5 PM on Monday.

Case 3: Create driver shifts to restrict route time windows

You use the business hours to model driver shifts in these distinct ways as illustrated in the table below:

The end of the time window sets both the end of the route and the end of the driver shift. In this case, the gap between the first Closed value and the second Open value must be greater that 1 minute. The first route must end on or before 6 PM on Sunday.

The end of the time window sets the end of the route only. The driver shift can continue to handle another route. In this case, the gap between the first Closed value and the second Open value must be 1 minute or less. A second route can start on or after 6:02 on Sunday and must end on or before 6 AM on Monday. The shift is continuous based on the 1 minute gap between Sunday Closed and Monday Open.