Emergency Quota Eats the Daily Plan
A residential HVAC company runs 120 technicians across eight work zones and handles about 2,400 activities per day. Roughly 15% are emergency repairs with a four-hour response commitment; the rest are standard maintenance. The implementation defines one capacity category, Service, with a daily quota of eight hours per technician. Routing fills technicians with standard maintenance by 10:00 a.m., leaving no room for emergencies. Dispatchers then either push emergencies to the next day or assign them as overtime. The company is missing the four-hour commitment on 23% of emergency calls, and overtime has risen 19%. A proposal to raise the quota to ten hours reduced misses but increased burnout and overtime cost. The routing plan currently has one priority level, Standard, and emergency work orders are created with the same activity type as maintenance. There are 14 activity types and three skills: heating, cooling, and electrical.
1. Diagnose why raising the single quota did not fix emergency response. What capacity model would you recommend?
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The single Service capacity category treats emergency and maintenance as interchangeable demand. Standard work consumes the same eight-hour bucket early in the day, so emergencies have no reserved capacity. Raising the quota to ten hours only adds more total supply; routing still fills it with standard work and emergencies still compete for the tail. Split capacity into at least two categories: Emergency and Standard. Give each resource a daily emergency quota, for example 1.5 hours, and a standard quota, for example 6.5 hours, keeping the total at eight hours. Make emergency activities consume the emergency category and standard activities consume the standard category. Use separate activity types or a mandatory property so the category is unambiguous. If some resources are not emergency-qualified, assign the emergency quota only to qualified resources. This reserves supply without paying overtime. The total quota should be based on actual productive hours, not on a hope that ten hours will cover the gap.
2. How would you configure routing so emergency capacity is protected but not wasted? Include priority, trigger routing, and a release rule.
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Set the routing plan priority so emergency work is routed before standard work. Use trigger routing for emergency activities so they are assigned as soon as they are created, rather than waiting for the next daily routing run. Configure the emergency capacity category and quota per qualified resource. To avoid stranding reserved capacity, use a cut-off: if the emergency reserve is unused by, say, 14:00, release it to standard work for the remainder of the day. Implement the release through time-slot quotas if your design uses time slots, or through a scheduled message scenario that adjusts the standard quota for the afternoon. Do not simply let standard routing consume the emergency bucket at any time; that recreates the original problem. Add a routing filter that prevents standard activity types from being assigned against the emergency category. Test with a day of simulated demand: 15% emergency arrivals, including a 10:00 spike, and confirm emergency response stays within four hours without overtime.
3. Which measures would you monitor weekly, and what thresholds would trigger a redesign?
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Monitor emergency response time against the four-hour commitment, preferably at the 90th percentile as well as the average; emergency quota utilization by resource and by hour; standard quota utilization; overtime hours; travel time per activity; unassigned emergency activities; and the number of emergencies pushed to the next day. Also track the percentage of emergency work assigned to qualified resources. A reasonable trigger for redesign is 90th-percentile response above four hours for two consecutive weeks, emergency quota utilization below 50% by 14:00 (reserve too large), or standard overtime above 5% while emergency reserve is unused. If emergency quota is consistently exhausted before noon, increase the reserve or add qualified resources. If standard work is consistently unassigned while emergency reserve sits unused, reduce the reserve or improve the release rule. Review by work zone, because an aggregate number can hide a zone with too few qualified technicians.