Time Slot Booking
Time Slot Booking
What is Time Slot Booking or Time Slotting?
Time Slot Booking (also shortened as Time Slotting) is the service to provide customers possible time slots to book via Internet. Thanks to internet and e-commerce, this service has become a crucial element in improving user experience for service providers and e-tailers (for home delivery or pickup point). Additional aspects are to have different prices per time slot, e.g., depending on expected forecast (called dynamic pricing) and the flexibility to change the delivery address, e.g. from home to pick-up point or vice versa.
Why use Time Slot Booking?
Home delivery, as well as the combination with pick-up point or store (for returns) is growing rapidly for various sectors, like food and non-food goods, for which time slot booking with dynamic pricing as a service is a must. But also for all kind of services, like installations, inspections, maintenance jobs the booking of time slots and follow-up during execution is a necessity.
How to use Time Slot Booking?
Time slot booking is executed by asking an optimizer engine to return extremely fast which time slots are available, and the associated cost or prices, based on the actual and forecasted bookings. For this the engine calculates the actual or expected work load over the day, and/or per region.
Why not use pre-defined number of bookings per time slot?
Example: pre-defined maximum of 10 deliveries in an area in London City in one time slot Time slot 1: If the 10 deliveries are far away from each other, then 2 deliveries cannot be reached in time Time slot 2: If the 10 deliveries are close to each other, this leaves room for 2 more deliveries in the neighborhood What are the results of optimizing Time Slot Booking? Optimizing Time Slot Booking or Time Slotting results in the opportunity to realize: Integrated time slotting and routing Flexibility in offering home delivery or a pickup point Flexibility in pricing per time slot Flexibility to change the delivery address, e.g. from home to pick-up point or vice versa Improved user experience, service levels and customer satisfaction Why contact ORTEC? ORTEC has both experience in optimizing engines for time slot bookings (e.g., for service organizations or in food and non-food delivery) as well as in dynamic pricing, and in the combination of it. Typical benefits are in efficiency improvement (various cases with over 10% improvement) but also in revenue increase and service improvements (by proposing more possible time slots for delivery).
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