Scheduling Function

Scheduling Function

Purpose

Rental Car Manager has a Scheduling Function available.
This function allows you to re-organise allocated bookings to provide the best possible utilisation of the vehicles available. The Scheduling function will try to fit all of the allocated bookings for a period into vehicles so that there are very small amounts of available time between bookings. This could possibly open up other vehicles to have larger periods of available time to enable you to fit more bookings in.

This function is not available as part of the standard RCM system, if you are interested in it, you will need to get in touch with RCM support support@rentalcarmanager.com.
Before running the Scheduling Function there are 2 parameters that will need to be setup. They are Vehicle Turn Around Hours and Excluding Vehicles.

Vehicle Turn Around Hours

The Vehicle Turn Around hours allows you to specify how many hours are required between the drop off and the next pickup for the same vehicle.
You can access the Vehicle Turnaround hours from Vehicle Maintenance > Vehicle Categories> Turnaround Hours tab. 
As you can see in the image below you are able to setup these turn around hours up based upon the following information, the pickup, drop off locations, and the Vehicle turn around hours are the only mandatory fields:



Excluding Days from the Turn Around Period 

You can also exclude days of the week from being included in the turn-around period.  One reason for doing this is in the case of campervans where it may take 1 day to clean the vehicle and get it ready for the next booking, if you do not have cleaning staff working on certain days of the week, you will want to remove that day from the turn around period.
Please see the Excluding Days from Turn Around Period article for full information and instruction for setup.

Excluding Vehicles

You are able to exclude specific vehicles from the Scheduling Function. You are able add vehicles to this list and them remove them again at any time, i.e., you may only want to exclude a vehicle one time you run the Scheduler.
You can access the Scheduler and The Exclusive Vehicles via System Setup>Scheduler - note that you will only have access to this menu item when RCM Support have setup the function for you. 


There may be several reasons why you want to exclude a vehicle from the Scheduling Function, two reasons may be:
  1. You have bookings within the period you are running the Scheduler for that you do not want moved to different vehicles.
  2. You may have 2 bookings back to back with less than your turn around time and you do not want the Scheduler moving these bookings.

Running the Scheduler

You can see in the image below where you both run the Scheduler and setup the necessary parameters.

When you run the Scheduler you choose the following options:
  1. Vehicle Category,
  2. Start Date,
  3. Number of days to run for, and
  4. The turn around time for bookings where the previous drop off location is the same as the pickup location for the booking being re-scheduled.  This will only be used if there is no matching record in the Vehicle Turn Around Hours screen.
When you are running the Scheduler the following things items are important to consider:
  1. We recommend running the Scheduler either at the start of the end of a day. Running this function while operators are actively loading/updating bookings can cause issues.
  2. To speed up this process, run it for a smaller number of days.
  3. The longer bookings will be scheduled first.
  4. Maintenance bookings will not be moved.
  5. Unallocated bookings are not included in the Scheduler.
  6. When the Scheduler is running, if it cannot find an available vehicle where the vehicle is in the location in question it will try to find an available vehicle in another location, taking into account the Turnaround Hours applicable between the 2 locations that you have setup.
  7. It is important to make sure that all of the bookings have the correct status against them. For example, any bookings with a pickup date before today should have a status of Hired rather than Reservation.
  8. If you run the Scheduler for a period of time and there are bookings beyond that time, you may end up with overlapping bookings. This is because the Scheduler does not take any bookings into account that fall outside of the time period it is running for.   If this occurs the Scheduler will let you know when it has finished.  All you need to do is run the Scheduler again starting at the end date of the previous run.

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