WFO - technicians lunch break
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yesterday - last edited yesterday
Hi team,
Has anyone configured FSM to allow technicians to take flexible breaks — meaning they can choose both when and how long their break is — instead of following a fixed time window?
- If so, could you share how you approached it?
My context:
Right now, we define a static “break” or blocked time window (e.g., 12:00–13:00) so Schedule Optimization doesn’t assign work during that period.
- Using the OOTB “break” event type in the schedule plan/shift (via WFO), we can define a break window such as 11:00–13:00 with a 1-hour duration.
WFO can stagger breaks to ensure coverage (e.g., some agents take 11:00–12:00, others 12:00–13:00).
Schedule Optimization includes a constraint called “Enable Flexible Breaks”, so it considers this in its machine learning calculations.
The issue is that if a field agent decides to start their break earlier (say 11:30–12:30), we want intraday optimization to detect this and reoptimize their schedule — shifting tasks as needed and possibly adding a new task in the newly available 30-minute window.
However, OOTB we can’t edit a “break” event from either the mobile app or the manager workspace.
We’ve considered using a different event type (e.g., “meeting” relabeled as “lunch break”) since it’s editable and would still block the agent’s calendar.
The downside is that we’d lose the OOTB break functionality, including staggered break support in WFO and Schedule Optimization (which ensures, for example, Tech1 takes 11:00–12:00 and Tech2 takes 12:00–13:00).
- That staggered break is not really important, we just need to block 1 hour in the SchOP run since the next day the technicians will re-trigger intraday optimization anyways when they decide to take their break.
- Not important, but we still want SchOp to assign breaks between 11:00-13:00
- We'd like to use OOTB and not do a workaround if possible OR closest to using the "break" from schedule plan/shift (WFO). We are trying to see if we can make this editable, but the API code is not public.
