Oct/Nov 2007

What is being described as the world's largest scheduling contract has been placed with UK company 360 Technologies, which is these days marketing itself as 360 Scheduling.

The customer is a French public utility, and the contract involves 42,000 resources. 360 Scheduling was not able to name the organisation, but the announcement was accompanied by an electricity pylon and a French flag.

The operation involves 'break/fix', scheduled maintenance, emergency work and long-term infrastructure projects.

In such a major application, 360 Scheduling was not surprisingly involved in a six-month selection process. It says that a key priority was its ability to deliver the solution in a service-oriented (hosted) form. The company says that it was the only contender able to satisfy both the integration requirements and the highly complex scheduling prerequisites, which involve a mix of planned maintenance and real-time emergency response management.

 

The scheduling task is described as 'huge' - not only because of the number of technicians and despatch staff involved on a day-to-day basis, but also because of the broad mix of tasks, skills and certification required to operate for a major national utility.

Managing director Laurent OthacŽhŽ says: 'The sheer size and complexity demanded by the project and the protracted selection process asked many questions of our unique core software architecture, testing our claims for scalability and resilience to the maximum.'