Abstract: The present invention provides a vacation and holiday scheduling system. The system includes a variety of objects to assist a business in controlling and managing the scheduling of vacations by their employees and for assisting the employees in bidding on vacation days and holidays based upon employee seniority.

Abstract: An apparatus for use in an advanced intelligent network (AIN) having a service control point (SCP) . The apparatus includes a number of functional components "abstracted" into a control hierarchy including a rules engine, one or more enhanced service applications, one or more intelligent peripheral controllers, and a set of intelligent peripheral adapters. The rules engine supports one or more rules for use in provisioning an enhanced service according to the enhanced service application. Each enhanced service (ES) application translates each rule required by the application into a set of one or more application level service primitives for its associated IPC. The IPC, in turn, translates each application level service primitive into a set of directives to control each intelligent peripheral adapter (IPA) connected to the IPC. At the lowest level of the hierarchy, an IPA translates each IPA directive into actual hardware instructions for controlling a particular switch or resource.

Abstract: A method for scheduling personnel (e.g., agents) in a work environment based on personnel "skill" levels. The method facilitates true skills-based scheduling of agents in a telephone call center using a simulation tool to predict what fraction of scheduled agents from each "skill group" will be available to each "call type" during each time interval being scheduled. A feedback mechanism is used to adjust net staffing and skills usage data between iterations of a call handling simulation until a given schedule being tested through the simulator meets some acceptance criteria.

Abstract: A method for planning, scheduling and managing personnel in an environment in which there is a varying workload by time of day and by day of week to be staffed with a team having a variable number of servers. The method begins by organizing the team of servers into a plurality of management units, each management unit having one or more groups of individual servers. One or more tour templates, each describing a bounded work shift having work rules and operating constraints, are then defined. A forecast is then generated of an event load expected to occur during a forecast time period and a number of servers required to service the expected event load during the forecast time period. The method then allocates expected event load among the plurality of management units according to a predetermined number of servers expected to be available at each management unit during the forecast time period.

Abstract: A method, using a call processor, for selecting one of a plurality of call centers in a telephone network. The method begins by generating a routing plan comprising one or more rules that control how calls are to be distributed among the call centers. For each call to be distributed, the rules in the routing plan are executed for a set of valid call center destinations until a destination for the call has been selected or until all rules have been executed. If all rules have been executed and more than one call center is still a valid destination for the call, the remaining call center destinations are then further evaluated according to the rules to select a destination for the call.

Abstract: A force management system includes a unique management display system for managing server schedules during a forecast time period. The system generates a schedule management screen which includes a timescale and a set of schedule activity codes for each server juxtaposed with the timescale to indicate the server's availability to respond to an event during the server's schedule. The system also generates a companion performance analysis screen. The performance analysis screen includes a timescale representation of forecast time period intervals, and displays call handling performance data for each interval comparing actual event load during the forecast time period with the event load expected to occur during the forecast time period.