Mobile Resource Management Platform

The Mobile Resource Management (MRM) Platform has been designed to deliver a high level of fit to the needs of organisations that manage mobile staff (who may or may not work for the same company) and/or geographically distributed assets, and who also have a need to involve mobile resources in real-time enterprise business processes. It provides a suite of mobile applications to organisations that need to deliver work orders to mobile staff. The MRM Platform assists in the process of making decisions on work allocation to staff and then communicates work packages wirelessly to field staff where the work packages can potentially combine information from many different enterprise applications systems. It provides the tools to monitor the execution of this work and can generate events to flag exceptions to ensure that appropriate service levels are being met. After, the work has been completed, the system updates the existing enterprise applications with information regarding the work undertaken.

The MRM Platform is comprised of integrated platform and application components that allow enterprise customers to rapidly deploy mobile application services to their workforce.

The diagram below illustrates the architecture of the Mobile Resource Management Platform.

The Integration Framework provides the means for co-ordinating all interactions with existing enterprise systems. It is based on Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004. Microsoft BizTalk Server provides the adapters to integrate with enterprise applications, data transformation services, and the ability to configure process workflows to co-ordinate the flow of work from enterprise applications, through the MRM Platform to the field users and back again. Any workflows required in the back office related to field work (e.g. approvals, etc) are also co-ordinated through the Integration Framework.

Within the Integration Framework, there are three key process management modules of that co-ordinate the interactions with external applications and the field workforce. These are as follows:-

	The Work Manager – manages and co-ordinates the workflows for each job type or class of work that is handled within the system. There are two main classes of workflows that are managed by the Work Manager – planned work and reactive, high priority work.
	The Resources Manager – manages the co-ordination of information about resources between all components of the MRM Platform and all external systems. In many cases, an external system (e.g. HR system) will be the master repository for information about resources. Any changes in resource information or status will trigger the Resources Manager to take the appropriate action. In addition, if the change in resource status has other implications such as the removal of current work assignments because a resource assigned to the work is now unavailable, then a workflow will be initiated to perform this function. The Resources Manager uses Microsoft Active Directory to manage the local MRM Platform view of available resources.
	The Event Manager – events can be triggered by user input from the field, by functions within the MRM Platform that are actively monitoring the field work and resources, or from enterprise applications. The Event Manager manages workflows associated with events that are not directly related to the Work Manager or Resources Manager functions.

The Work Scheduling module provides the ability to plan, optimise, and schedule day to day field work ensuring that resources are allocated with optimal efficiency and that allocations adhere to an organisation’s standard business procedures and HR and IR guidelines. The Work Scheduling module incorporates street map data to ensure that field workers spend the smallest possible amount of time travelling. The Work Scheduling module is very flexible with new business rules for work scheduling able to be configured very easily. The Work Scheduling module operates in three modes – batch work scheduling, appointment planning, and work rescheduling. The last two modes provide a real-time scheduling capability. Batch work scheduling operates when a batch of planned work needs to be allocated to field resources prior to the start of a day or shift. Appointment planning is used to plan appointment times for work in real time. This is essential in meeting the needs of call centre applications. Work rescheduling is used to find a new time and/or resource allocation for work that was not able to be done as planned. The Work Scheduling module is an optional module. If work schedules are pre-planned in existing applications and do not often need to be re-organised to respond to unforseen events then this module may not be needed.

The Dispatch and Tracking module provides facilities for dispatchers to release work to field staff and to track and monitor both work and resources in real time. Using a map background and GPS inputs from the field, dispatchers can visualise the status of resources and work and can see the progress of scheduled work as it is being completed. Using easily configurable monitoring rules, the system will continuously monitor the status and progress of both work and resources and will generate events if any of the configured rules are violated.

If the business has to also manage reactive or emergency work to respond to changing circumstances, new work can created within the dispatch system by dispatchers and sent to field staff. New work created this way can be also sent to enterprise applications via the Integration Framework to keep these systems up to date with all work sent to the field.

The Mobile Application Server module is responsible for co-ordinating the sending of work to Mobile Application Clients in the field. It is a stateless server that manages opportunistic connections with field clients. When a Mobile Application Client requests an update, all work currently dispatched for that user is determined and all data items for that work is gathered from enterprise systems and sent to the Mobile Application Client.

A management and development environment is provided for developing new applications and for managing both the field user client configuration and the applications available to users. Configured applications can be delivered to Mobile Application Clients remotely. The development environment for mobile applications is based on Visual Studio .NET with extensions to support the rapid development and deployment of new mobile applications. The Mobile Application Server can also receive regular GPS position updates from client devices and pass this data on to the Dispatch and Tracking Module. When a new job is sent to a field user, the Dispatch and Tracking module triggers an automatic update to the field client so that the field user will automatically see the new job.

The Mobilus MRM Platform is deployed on Windows Server 2003 and utilises the Microsoft .NET Framework and .Net Compact framework as well as Microsoft SQL Server for data management and reporting.