Patent ID: 8364513

Claim:
A technician control system comprising: a control system configured to control scheduling and dispatch operations for work orders being handled by technicians associated with a client; at least one electronic data store configured to store data associated with the client; and multiple technician devices that are each associated with one or more technicians, configured to communicate, over a network, with the control system, and configured to provide output in response to communications that are received from the control system and that are related to the scheduling and dispatch operations performed by the control system; wherein the control system includes at least one processor configured to perform operations comprising: aggregating a set of pre-defined scheduling configuration options, at least one scheduling configuration option representing a scheduling goal that encompasses multiple tunable parameters of a scheduling application, rather than corresponding to a single tunable parameter of the scheduling application; receiving, from the client, user input selecting a subset of the scheduling configuration options; storing, in the at least one electronic data store and in association with the client, configuration data that reflects the selected subset of the scheduling configuration options; based on the configuration data that reflects the selected subset of the scheduling configuration options, configuring, for the client, the scheduling application used by the control system to perform scheduling operations for the client, the configuration including: automatically, without user intervention, identifying tunable parameters of the scheduling application that are grouped within the selected subset of the scheduling configuration options, the number of parameters included in the identified tunable parameters being greater than the number of options included in the selected subset of the scheduling configuration options, and automatically, without user intervention, adjusting the identified tunable parameters of the scheduling application based on the selected subset of the scheduling configuration options, thereby enabling changes to performance of the scheduling application without requiring direct tuning of the identified tunable parameters of the scheduling application; and performing scheduling operations for the client using the configured scheduling application.