Enhancing field service operations via fuzzy automation of tactical supply plan

Tactical supply planning (TSP) is an integral part of the end-to-end field resource planning process. It takes as input, constrained demand from the strategic plan at monthly (or quarterly) level, decomposes it to daily or weekly level and plans the capacity accordingly to meet the expected demand. The plan is then executed and sent to a work allocation system for on-the-day scheduling of individuals tasks to resources. A tactical supply plan ensures that there are enough resources available in the field on any given day. It highlights underutilised resources and offers recommendations on how best to deploy surplus resources. As such, TSP focuses on improving customer satisfaction by minimising operational cost and maximising right-first-time (RFT) objectives. In this chapter, we describe opportunities and challenges in automating tactical supply planning and present a fuzzy approach to address the challenges. The motivation is to minimise the effort required for producing a resource plan. More importantly, our objective is to leverage computation intelligence to produce optimised supply plan in order to increase RFT and the customer satisfaction.