Dell Technologies caters to 72 countries. The Field Services division of Dell works with all retail and enterprise clients requiring on-premises support. With a high volume of incoming requests spanning across several product lines, FSEs resolve these requests as a critical part of the team. 

The Field Services business model gives the team access to the resource pool of highly skilled Dell Badged FSEs as well as Partner Field Engineers from third-party agencies. The current resource capacity planning process is based on a click system that auto dispatches to field or partner based on skill and availability, as outlined in the following figure:

Figure 1.              HES Field Services Dispatch assignment process

The Field Service business is tasked with working under a plethora of constraints while delivering a high-quality experience to customers.

Focused on optimizing the FSE availability and utilization across the Asia Pacific region, the APJC Business Operations team sought a better understanding of the performance and resourcing.

Associated challenges include:

• Strategizing training needs of FSEs¹
• Enhancing efficiency of FSE during working hours²
• Optimizing utilization of available resources, staffing levels across different countries³ and more

1. Science Direct, The Multidimensional 0–1 Knapsack Problem: An Overview, 2004

2. IEEE, Modeling and Optimization of Content Delivery Networks with Heuristics Solutions for Multidimensional Knapsack Problem, 2016

3. Towards Science Data, Dynamic program vs integer program: which one is better for the knapsack problem?, 2020