Process Scheduling Solutions

Process Scheduling Solutions mean different kinds of software that helps business managers to administer business resources and working processes running within their enterprises to reach the higher efficiency of existing means. While carrying out these efforts, managers resort to help of their specific algorithms that are defined by capacity of resources they operate, aims they want to reach, and constraints of processes they manage. This article is an attempt to provide you with brief business overview along with proposing some easy-to-use process scheduling solutions. While each company elaborates its own model covering their specific needs, the criteria are usually defined by the following assumptions:

• Each unit of business resources (manpower, equipment, premises, etc) shouldn’t be assigned to more workloads, than its capacity allows to perform during a period of time;
• There must be no idle units of resources, if some resources stay idle than there are just no appropriate workloads for them, however all variants to load them need be considered;
• All company’s business job should be well-analyzed, mapped out, and totally measured to know their requirements for resources (average amounts, types, minimal and excessive levels);
• All available business resources need to be properly tested and evaluated (with appropriate level of accuracy) to know their maximal capacity, and average period of time they are able to keep working maximally-loaded until they lose their efficacy, along with costs of these efforts, etc;

There could be the following problems (that can be resolved by a more accurate and rational approach to driving business processes, and elaborating specific strategies):

• Business process fails (being blocked or postponed) on certain step as there are no free business resources available – all existing resources are already overloaded by other tasks;
• It fails to reach good quality level as time constraints were broken (because the assigned resource had more of important tasks in a sequence to process, so it had to work much faster to complete everything on time);
• Company overruns normal process costs as company’s business obligations forced them to acquire more of business resources (add more working capacity) to accomplish all workloads and tasks they undertake on time and on quality;

Effective process scheduling solutions maintain the following functions:

• structure – this is a map of all business processes which run within the company’s entire workflow to learn how they are interrelated, how they can be coordinated, and what amount of resources they currently engage;
• parameters – in order to reach the best possible effectiveness of operating with the business resources, a company needs to map out the business process constraints (requirements for time, quality, costs, types of resources, etc) in order to create a schedule of resources fitting these requirements;

• levels – as far as the highest managerial levels delegate workloads to lower ones, they possess a high-level overview of how the organization’s business workflow is structured, so they need to perform ongoing prioritization of the processes and their steps to provide lower levels with guidelines on how they should allocate their capacities;
• techniques – there are lots of different methods to schedule workloads, for example there are techniques called “Fast-tracking” and “Crashing” which are both methods of Schedule Compression. First one means paralleling of tasks that usually go sequentially, while the second means adding more resources to complete work faster;

Example of solutions for small and medium business:

VIP Task Manager is a task and time management program for small and medium workgroups. It allows you to apply different process scheduling types to intensify and rectify your business workflow in order of getting more work accomplished than you usually do; however, this software is not a specific solution for designing business processes: it could help you to become more effective with working time, costs, and business resources, and getting them controlled in real-time regime via your LAN.