What is ARP?
The Advanced Resource Planner module serves a key role within Planning, Scheduling and Optimization and is a integral part of the overall solution.
Primarily the ARP performs the following functions with the solution
1. It acts as a Data Store / Data Repository - ARP Stores organizational data (in other words master data) that is relevant to perform the scheduling and opimization. This could be the Activity data such as the Appointment templates and SLA templates. General data such as Skills, Divisions and locations and Resource data such as the resource types and shift templates to name a few
2. It provides Shift Planning / Roster Generation capabilities - Using the shift planner in the ARP we can generate the roster for the resources and incorporate their working periods including their breaks (lunch) and overtime period if needed.
3. It supports the DSE - The ARP acts as a bridge between the Enterprise Application (EA) and the DSE and helps to compliments the DSE. On intial load the Data from the ARP is stiched up with the data coming in from EA and fed into the DSE engine which then uses this information to carry out its scheduling and optimization tasks.
Reason for ARP - IFS PSO by design is built in a manner wherein it is External Application agnoistic. It can act as the scheduling engine to any external workforce management system.
While we do have a very close out of the box integration with IFS FSM and IFS Apps and for IFS cloud a even tighter integration (which can be almost defined as a single application) but by design PSO can function by being integrated with any 3rd party system.
In order to facilitate this EA agnostic behavior and in addition to supplement the scheduling engine with the necessary data specific to scheduling which is ideally not stored in the the EA, the ARP finds it use and function.
Note that it is not mandatory to use the ARP and the DSE can operate by itself when provided all the necessary information. However, depending on the use case it may be easier and simpler to just use the ARP and store the necessary data, settings and rules in it directly then to sent it via a integration from the external application thereby simplifying the integration between the external application and the PSO system.