Optimize Adaptive Capacity: Configure Strategic Rules

Overview

After you've learned how Adaptive Capacity works and determined your account setup, you can configure additional settings and rules to customize it. This gives you more control over how Adaptive Capacity works for your business.

With Strategic Rules, you can adjust the capacity threshold based on time and attribute constraints, like business units, job types, technicians, or zones.

Tip: To help build rules faster, you can use Atlas in Adaptive Capacity Strategic Rules.

Things to know

• If needed, you can download a report of all your Adaptive Capacity Strategic Rules and their values.
  

• You can download an audit trail for each individual rule that’s had changes. The exported .csv file shows you who made changes and when, and also includes the before and after values.
  

• You can use Business Unit, Job Type, Job Type Group, Shift Type, Skill, Team, Technician, Technician Type, Trade, and Zone attributes to filter and organize Adaptive Capacity. To optimize capacity, configure these in a way that reflects your organization. For more, see:        

  • Prepare for Adaptive Capacity: Configure core settings and features

  • Optimize Adaptive Capacity: Configure Basic and Advanced Settings

• For tag-based rules to work properly, tags need to be added to a job before clicking Get Adaptive Availability.

Best practices

• You don't need a rule for every job type or every condition. The default capacity is 100%, so you only need rules for exceptions or departures from your natural capacity.

• Use rules sparingly. Start simple and get accustomed to what your natural capacity is.

• Build a limited set of rules. Build one at a time and test out how it works so you're not getting confused by too many rules that overlap with each other.

Use cases

• You have a large geographical area so you use the combination of zones, technicians, or job types to specify which technicians should be working in which zones, or which job types should be placed in which zones for which days of the week.

• You want to improve your job mix so you throttle different job types up and down based on a time range. This is particularly useful if your business is seasonal. For example, In the summer, you anticipate a lot of emergency jobs coming in so you limit the number of maintenance jobs you do to a particular threshold so that the bulk of your board can be left open for emergency cases that are more lucrative.

• You limit after hour calls to certain job types. For example, you block all maintenance jobs during after hours so that you're not assigning on-call technicians to a simple maintenance or a tune-up at night.

• You want to limit capacity to 85% starting tomorrow to allow for same-day emergencies while maintaining a full capacity of 100% for today. You can create a rule using a relative date range so you don't have to adjust the date range of the rule each day.

• You have 20 maintenance-related job types that all require the same skill. You can create a rule that has the skill as a condition so that it will cover changes to all 20 job types.

How rules work

By default, Adaptive Capacity uses the following calculation to determine availability based on natural capacity:

[Natural Capacity Provided from your business hours or technician shifts] ➖ [Capacity Consumed from scheduled assigned or unassigned jobs and non-job events with timesheets] 🟰 [remaining hours of Natural Open Capacity]

When you create a rule, Adaptive Capacity uses the following calculation after determining availability from natural capacity:

[Natural Capacity from your technicians and their eligibility to perform jobs] ✖️ [Capacity Threshold percentage from Strategic Rules] ➕ or ➖ [Manual Adjustments applied in reporting] 🟰 [Strategic Capacity]

For any conditions you define for the rule—like business unit, job type, technician, or zone—consider how many technicians fit that criteria and, on average, how many hours they work per day and window during the time range you've defined.

Configure Strategic Rules for Adaptive Capacity

Go to Settings > Adaptive Capacity > Strategic Rules to configure rules that adjust the capacity threshold based on time and attribute constraints, like business units, job types, technicians, or zones.

Configuring rules can help improve operational efficiency, reduce rescheduling and cancellation rates, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction.

Note: The effect of the rules will be reflected across Capacity Reporting, Get Adaptive Availability, and any services that integrate with Adaptive Capacity, like Scheduling Pro.

To build a new rule:

1. Click Create Rule.

2. On the screen that opens, enter the following information:        

   • Rule Name: Enter a concise name for the rule.

   • (Optional) Description: Enter a description of the rule.

   • Activation Period: Select if you want the rule to be Ongoing, start and end within a Fixed Date Range, or be applied across a Relative Date Range that automatically adjusts relative to the current date. If you select Relative Date Range, you can choose to have it applied for only Today, Tomorrow, the Next 3 Days, the Next 7 Days, or you can select a Custom Relative Date Range.

   • Enable the rule upon creation: Select this to activate the rule immediately after you create it. If you don't select this, the rule will be inactive.                

     Note: When rules overlap, the most restrictive rule gets applied. For example, if you have a rule that applies a threshold of 0% and another rule that applies a threshold of 50% percent, and both rules impact the same set of technicians, then the 0% rule will get applied.

   • Conditions: Click Add Date/Time Criteria to set date and time criteria, if applicable, based on Days of Week or Time Range. Then click Add conditions to add at least one condition for the rule based on Business Unit, Job Type, Technician, Zone, Technician Type, Tag Type, Skill, Shift Type, or Job Type Group. All conditions must be met for the rule to work.

   • Action: Select a percentage or set a custom percentage as the threshold for the rule.

3. When finished, click Create Rule.         

   Tip: If you want to create another rule using similar criteria, you can click Duplicate and then make any needed changes to the duplicated rule.

After you create rules, you can use the toggle in the Status column of the rules table to deactivate or activate them as needed. You can also Edit existing rules.

Examples of custom rules

Example 1: Completely block capacity

Let's say your goal is to only service one of your zones on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. To achieve this, you can create a rule that blocks capacity for that zone on all other weekdays:

• Select Ongoing for the Activation Period.

• Select Weekday as a Condition that includes Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

• Select Zone as a Condition that includes Zone 1.

• Select 0% for the Action threshold.

Remember, the rule multiplier is a percentage determined by capacity rules you set up. In this rule the threshold is 0%, meaning it's a complete block of capacity. This is a very basic rule, but you can add additional conditions to make it more granular. For example:

• You could add a technician criteria that blocks certain technicians from working in Zone 1 on these days.

• You could add a job type condition that blocks certain job types from being bookable in that zone on these days.

• You could add arrival windows or specify a time range to limit capacity in parts of the day.

Example 2: Partially block capacity

Let's say your goal is to do two less maintenance jobs per day across your technicians.

• You have two technicians who are eligible for Maintenance job types.

• Each technician works eight hours a day and each maintenance job is two hours.

• Your natural capacity means you can do 2 x 8 = 16 hours of maintenance jobs each day.

• Since you want to do two less maintenance jobs per day, your strategic capacity is 12 hours, because maintenance jobs should be bookable up to 12 hours per day.

Given these considerations, divide the 12 hours you want to be bookable by the 16 hours of natural capacity to get the capacity threshold percentage you need for your rule:

[12 hours of Target Capacity] / [16 hours of Natural Capacity] = [75% Capacity Threshold]

Now, when you apply a rule that limits the Maintenance job type by a 75% capacity threshold, you get:

[75% Capacity Threshold From Rule] * [16 hours of Natural Capacity] = [12 hours of Strategic Capacity]

Want to learn more?

• Visit ServiceTitan Academy and enroll in Optimizing Adaptive Capacity for Managers

• See Adaptive Capacity overview: Learn how it works

• See Prepare for Adaptive Capacity: Configure core settings and features

• See Optimize Adaptive Capacity: Configure Basic and Advanced Settings

• See Adaptive Capacity FAQ