Pre-Planning for Recurring Visits
Turn municipal decisions into approved, ready-to-execute schedules before they reach daily ops. Caire blends OCR ingestion, AI optimization, and customer sign-off to eliminate trial-and-error loops.
Pre-planning of recurring visits
🎯 Overview: Pre-Planning enables home care organizations to optimize recurring visits before they enter the daily scheduling system. Caire replaces manual trial-and-error with AI-driven optimization, saving over 50% time during new customer onboarding while achieving 75-80%+ service time efficiency and 80% first-proposal approval rates.
🎨 Interactive UX Mockups
Innovation
All tasks start as flexible. Caire adds intelligence by accepting all visits with time windows, finding optimal fixed times through AI optimization, facilitating customer meetings, exporting finished schedules to operations systems, and enabling daily optimization with flexibility buffers.
Problems Solved
Traditional "trial loop" is replaced by comprehensive AI pre-planning that considers all visits simultaneously, all staff schedules and skills, all travel times and geographical constraints, customer preferences, and mandatory vs optional task prioritization.
Traditional Challenges:
- Time-consuming: 4-8 hours per new customer onboarding with manual "trial loop"
- Suboptimal: Only tests small subsets of visits, misses the big picture
- Manual errors: Must enter data multiple times in different systems
- No route optimization: Travel routes not considered during pre-planning
- Reactive: Customer preferences collected without showing feasible alternatives
Core Concepts
Time Window (Pre-Planning)
Definition: Allowed period during which a visit CAN be scheduled, e.g. "Morning 07:00-10:00" or "Lunch 11:00-13:00". The purpose is to guide AI optimization to find feasible patterns that match staff availability, customer lifestyle, travel efficiency and workload distribution.
Flexibility Minutes (Daily Optimization)
Definition: Small buffer (±15 or ±30 minutes) around a fixed time that allows daily adjustments for traffic delays, delays from previous visits, or when staff starts the shift late. Set in Welfare/Epsilon or Carefox after pre-planning.
Mandatory vs Optional Visits
Mandatory visits (e.g. medication, meals) must be scheduled and cannot be skipped. Optional visits (e.g. walks, certain cleaning) can be postponed during resource conflicts. During optimization, mandatory visits are scheduled first.
Workflow
🎨 See interactive UX mockups: Click here to see interface designs
Step-by-Step Process
- Receive municipal decision: Upload PDF or manually enter visit details in Caire. PDF upload with OCR can automatically extract customer info, service types, duration and frequency.
- Assign time windows: Define allowed periods based on service type (e.g. "Morning 07:00-10:00" for breakfast, "Lunch 11:00-13:00" for lunch). System can automatically suggest time windows based on service type.
- Set priorities: Mark visits as mandatory (must be scheduled) or optional (can be postponed during resource conflicts)
- Run AI pre-planning: System optimizes all visits over 14-30 day windows considering staff, travel times, geography and skills. Process takes 5-15 minutes for a typical organization.
- Review proposal: Coordinators verify all mandatory visits are scheduled, staff skills match, travel times are reasonable, and no conflicts exist
- Customer meeting: Present proposed times and gather feedback or preferences. 70-80% of customers accept the first proposal.
- Adjust if needed: If customer has specific requests (e.g. "Breakfast must be 08:30"), re-run optimization with these as hard requirements
- Finalize: Approve and lock schedule in Caire with documented agreement date. Status changes to "Approved" and schedule is locked for export.
- Export: Enter fixed times into operations system (Welfare/Epsilon or Carefox) with flexibility minutes (±15 or ±30 min) for daily optimization
Use Cases
New customer onboarding: From municipal decision to approved schedule in 1-2 hours instead of 4-8 hours. AI finds optimal times that balance travel time, staff availability and customer preferences.
Periodic re-planning: Every 30-45 days, movable visits can be re-planned when efficiency drops or when new customers affect route patterns.
Customer preferences: When customers have specific requests (e.g. female caregiver for showering, no visits before 09:00 on weekends) these are treated as hard requirements in optimization.
Key Benefits
Measurable Results:
- 50-75% time savings: From 4-8 hours to 1-2 hours per new customer
- 75-80%+ service time efficiency: Optimal use of staff working hours
- 80% first-proposal approval: Most customers accept the first proposal
- Higher quality: All visits optimized simultaneously, not just subsets
- Better route optimization: Travel routes considered from the start, not after
- Proactive: Customer preferences collected with concrete, feasible proposals
Integration with Operations Systems
Welfare/Epsilon
Current State: Manual export - coordinators enter fixed times and flexibility minutes manually after schedule is finalized in Caire.
Future State: API integration planned for automatic export, eliminates manual data entry.
Carefox
Current State: Manual export for pre-planning, but automatic import for daily optimization.
Future State: Full API integration for both import and export, enables closed loop from pre-planning to daily operations.