Batched or chained?

“A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong.”
Tecumseh.

I have an interesting dilemma to pose for you today.

Let’s say you have a migration to undertake that involves your field work-force. The migration requires the re-direction of customer services from one destination to a new destination via re-patching at various points in the physical network spread across a wide geographical area.

Your OSS processes the migration (from an inventory perspective) as automated designs on a customer-by-customer or order-by-order basis because it’s the only way that it can trace out each new path. This means that a given patching/jumpering point may actually have many customer services traversing it without necessarily needing to be completely re-jumpered.

The question becomes whether you:

1. Issue work orders to your field workforce on a service-by-service basis to ensure that end-to-end (chained) connectivity is ensured by giving a singular accountability for reactivation of the new service; or
2. Issue batches of work orders for re-patching an entire patching point in one hit, thus reducing the amount of travel time and improving efficiency of effort, but having multiple workers involved in different parts of the end-to-end service

The same question could equally be posed for automated system tasks. Do you issue provisioning commands in a batch or do you design your process around completing and guaranteeing successful completion of each order in sequence?

Do your workforce management tools have the flexibility of automatically choosing between the batched or chained approach to assigning work orders? If so, which option have you found to be the most efficient and why?