Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Dan Grunspan

Ehud Pardo

Derik Bjorn Stenerson

Tobin James Zerba

The present invention describes the scheduling requirements if a business to an automatic scheduling system in a way which allows efficient automatic scheduling of appointments for resources of the business. In one embodiment, the scheduling system schedules the resources based not only on total capacity, but based on how many appointments can be initiated at a given time.

Resource-based capacity scheduling system

Each job is defined in terms of the tasks/services required to do the jobs, using resources needed to carry out those tasks/services at different times during a scheduling period. Each available resource needed for each task/service is associated with a job ID and different start times for a job, forming proposals. The proposals are preferably created prior to the time that any appointments are made to do the job. If an appointment time requested by a customer to have the job done is available among the proposals created, the appointment is scheduled using the proposal. As each appointment is scheduled, changed, or canceled, the available proposals for the job are automatically modified to reflect the changes in the time that each resource is available to do the tasks/services required for the job.

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Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Dan Grunspan