AngelTrack's Vertex AI can assist your call-takers in planning a last-minute booking.
When a call-taker accepts a call for transport on the day before, or at the last minute, when the schedule is already full, it is challenging to decide whether the schedule has room for one more trip. AngelTrack's Vertex AI can help!
Introducing: Vertex
If you are not already familiar with Vertex, please have a look at the Vertex Guide. It explains how to activate and use the system, and its prerequisites and limitations.
You may also get something of value from the Vertex FAQ.
The Difficulty of Visualizing the Call Schedule
When a customer calls and asks for transport at a certain date and time, ideally the call-taker would check the call schedule for that day, and see whether the additional call can be fitted in without too much disruption and late pickups. A call schedule is a complex multi-dimensional object -- pickup latitude and longitude, dropoff latitute and longitude, pickup and dropoff times, service level, ability of higher-level units to cover lower level calls, and so on -- which, beyond a small number of calls, no human brain can visualize.
This is the purpose of the Vertex AI: to brute-force all the possible permutations of a call schedule in order to find the lowest-cost solution, taking account of mileage, labor cost, and late pickups.
(You don't necessarily have to use Vertex to assign the whole day's trips; you might find value just in using it to check your planned coverage, to see how congested it is, and whether you can eliminate a unit or perhaps need to add one. You could then run the day using normal next-up dispatching, if that's what your dispatchers prefer.)
Vertex's ability to solve an entire day's call schedule means it has an unexpected benefit: You can use it during call-taking, to speculatively solve the day's schedule with and without the addition of another call.
Prerequisites
In order to show you how well your scheduled units can cover the day's workload, with and without the addition of another call, Vertex must know your shift schedule, i.e. you must be using AngelTrack's employee scheduler.
You don't have to be all-in on the employee scheduler. Even if the only shifts you schedule are those for tomorrow, Vertex can use those records to project tomorrow's call schedule, to show you the effect of any last-minute work-ins.
Even if you never schedule your shifts in advance, you can still use this feature for last-minute scheduling. As soon as the day's shifts are all active, Vertex can use them when solving the rest of the day's schedule, including any last-minute additions for the same day.
Try It Out
Don't worry, you can't break anything. Vertex will visualize the day's schedule for you, but it does not make any changes to the schedule or to the call you are booking.
To see how it works, book a pretend call for a date on which AngelTrack knows your shift schedule. Probably that is just the rest of today and tomorrow, but any date will work if you've got your crews scheduled. Here is how to do it:
- Click the add icon in the top-ribbon to book a new call.
- Specify the origin address if not already pre-filled.
- Specify the destination address.
- Select the desired service level.
- Choose the activation date and pickup time.
- Find the Vertex side-tab at the lower-right corner of the page, and mouse over it.
- For this demonstration, tick the ☑ Solve with and without this new trip checkbox. It will cause the solve to take twice as long, but then you'll get to see a before and after view of your schedule.
- Click the Vertex icon to solve the day.
When the solution appears, use the Before/After control to toggle between the two solves -- one containing your schedule as-is, and the other showing your schedule with the inclusion of the call you are booking.
Late pickups will blink, according to your late-pickups threshold which defaults to 20 minutes. Very late pickups -- more than twice your late-pickups threshold -- will blink quickly.
If you see a lot of lates, or if you see Vertex keeping shifts on-duty past their scheduled off time, then your schedule is congested; otherwise, Vertex found a way to run your schedule using only your scheduled units. It might even find a way to take a unit off-duty, in which case you will see a shift with no calls assigned.
Pickup Time Projection
When the Vertex solve comes back, it will tell you what arrival time it expects to provide. Ideally this will be the same as that requested by the customer, but possibly it will be later, if the optimal schedule does not allow for it.
If your schedule is jammed up at the requested time, remember you might be able to take the customer earlier than required, rather than later. Now that everyone's got a smartphone to keep themselves entertained, they might be contented to show up an hour early.
In any case the time projection is tentative. It could slip if more calls are added to the schedule later, or if the number and capabilities of your available shifts change, or the dozen other daily things that come up in our industry.
Last-Minute (Same Day) Work-Ins
In the middle of a day, Vertex can solve your remaining call schedule with whatever units are still available. This is called a mid-day solve, and it has special rules; please refer to the Vertex Guide to learn more about that.
Once you understand the rules of a mid-day solve, you can use it to check a last-minute work-in. Here is refresher on the rules:
- Any shift already enroute to a call is left alone to finish it. It is assumed to be available afterward, starting at the call's destination.
- Any call with a shift already enroute is left alone to run its course. Only those calls where no shift is yet enroute are included in the solve.
For example, suppose it's noon, and suppose all your units are busy running calls. You may or may not have got the rest of the afternoon pre-assigned, either way is fine. Suppose the phone rings, asking for last-minute transport to a doctor's appointment at 15:00.
To use Vertex to check this call against what you've already got for the afternoon, fill out the page for the new trip but don't save it yet. Click the Vertex icon and request a solve.
In the solution, your shifts will show as "available" at the expected finish time of whichever calls they are already running. This can cause an active shift to appear as unavailable until (say) 13:30, when they are expected to be free of its current call.
Likewise, you will not see any calls for which a shift has already gone enroute, per the rules above. You will only see shifts and calls which aren't yet being run.
The new call, and its return trip if any, will appear in the solution in the best available timeslot. Vertex will plan for it to be run by whichever shift is optimal, after all other trips are considered.
Vertex will try to run the call at the expected time, but might not be able to, after accounting for everything else.
Note, this could cause a reshuffling of the calls that your shifts might presently be expecting to take. If you've preassigned the entire day, Vertex might propose to re-jigger everything to fit in the new trip. That will be irksome, but it allows Vertex to find savings and efficiencies that you had never previously considered.
At this point Vertex will not commit the solution, or reassign anyone, it simply shows a projection of how it would solve the rest of the day were you to ask it. If you actually want to do that, i.e. if you want to perform the mid-day solve and commit the assignments, then finish booking the new trip, and then visit the Vertex page by clicking the lightning-bolt icon in the sidebar.
Using Your Surge Units
Normally, Vertex excludes your surge units (shifts held in reserve) when solving your call schedule. You can force it to include them by checking the ☑ Use our surge units too tickybox, thus allowing Vertex to make use of those crews to help cover the schedule.