The activity of service organizations can be divided in a number of different ways:

When geographical regions are important, one or more service facilities may provide inventory to engineers. Use Area Maintenance and Area Structure Maintenance to record these relationships.

Area Work Flow illustrates a typical workflow for setting up and using areas.

You can set up each facility and area office with a code in Area Maintenance (11.15.1). Use Area Structure Maintenance (11.15.5) to group and organize these facilities and offices. For example, group Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle service facilities under the Western Region, which you in turn group under the U.S. region. This grouping has no effect in service processing; it is for reference only.

If you are using engineer scheduling, define holidays for areas so that engineers are not scheduled on nonwork days in Area Holiday Maintenance (11.15.9).

Once you define areas, associate them with service engineers and end users. Engineer scheduling uses these relationships to assign engineers in the appropriate area to calls. To facilitate dispatching the appropriate engineer, you can sort calls by area in the Call Queue Manager.