Recursive Scheduling with Frequency Detail Feature

Let us consider a situation Jack, our Pharma Sales Manager has while scheduling his field sales reps. Certain clients’ of Jack’s company reorder their standard orders every 7 days. Some patients who directly buy from the company place this order every 10 days. Thus, scheduling the same set of appointments every few days is added work for Jack. Besides, at times the patients fail to place these reorders although they need the new stock of medicines impacting their treatments. In addition, the clients could also have availability constraints for delivery. Thus, to solve both situations, Jack and others like him can refer to the Recursive Scheduling form within the Frequency Detail Feature.

Adding Frequency Details for Recursive Scheduling

While adding the Frequency Details for an Account Entity, the user could specify the number of days after which the appointment needs to be rescheduled. In Jack’s case, this appointment would be of his sales rep going in to deliver the same medicine order. If the frequency is set to 7 days, the appointment shall be rescheduled every 7 days while setting up the appointment for weeks/month.

The next appointment date after 7 days will be automatically counted based on the date of the first appointment. i.e. If the first appointment has been set on the 7th of a month, the next would get scheduled on the 14th of that month.

The date of the previous appointment is populated automatically at the time of appointment creation as the ‘Last Schedule Date’ and the upcoming would be populated as the ‘Next Schedule Date’. Both the dates get updated with Appointment/ Activities Creation.

Note: Using the Advanced Find feature and the auto-populated Next Schedule Dates after appointment creation, records that would be due for a repeat appointment on a particular date can be selected and Auto Scheduling can be run only for those records.

Schedule Status

If an account has been enabled for recursive scheduling but has missed its last appointment due to conflicting client availability and has crossed the frequency interval, its Schedule Status will appear as ‘No’. In case the Schedule Status is ‘No’ then that appointment would be taken up on priority for the next frequency schedule. This will prevent the account from being skipped in the next appointment cycle.

Priority

When 2 or more accounts are available on the same days during the same time slots, the account with priority ‘High’ is scheduled first followed by ‘Medium’ and ‘Low’. In case, all the accounts have the same priority the account nearest to the sales rep is scheduled first.

Mass Frequency Update

The availability of a client and the required frequency of the appointment can be updated in a go using ‘Mass Frequency Update’. The frequency details available within an existing record can be easily assigned to the selected records.