AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Laraine Geddes

Laraine Geddes from Kirona, experts in dynamic resource scheduling, mobile and field service technology contributes an exclusive guide to successfully managing your organisation’s field based workforce...

1. Eradicate paper based systems

Expecting field workers to use paper based records is fraught with potential disaster and inefficiency. Paper based systems often required duplication of work, with data having to be re-entered into back office systems.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• Deploy mobile applications in the field so that employees only have to record information once while in the field. This improves accuracy of data and frees up more time to carry out more jobs per day. Mobile communication can also reduce inefficient back office administration tasks, or be used to record the information needed for audits.
• Use a workflow driven series of checklists and fields on the mobile device to make sure individual workers follow a standard process. This will ensure continuity of good practice across a region.
• Mobile devices are far more secure than paper. If they are lost data can be locked down through encryption, or Mobile Device Management systems.

2. Dynamic scheduling

Efficiently appointing who visits which site is simplified using dynamic scheduling rather than manual scheduling. Staff availability vs skills vs customer/site availability is difficult enough to balance, add to that factors like service levels, job location, cancellations, even traffic on the road and efficient scheduling is almost impossible.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• Deploy dynamic scheduling software that can, in real-time, optimise the utilisation of workers in the field - the right person goes to the right location at the right time. This way they spend more time on site and less time waiting for the next job or, for instance, driving unnecessarily long distances to the next job
• Scheduling software can be tuned to deploy personnel based upon pre-set ‘rules’. Work with your technology vendor to utilise this feature so that services can be optimised; like prioritising workers that have visited the site or customer before, or restricting distances to be travelled by employees, or scheduling according to customer needs.
• Consider that most mobile working visits will usually need a follow up visit or another appointment made with a different worker – your scheduling software can allocate new appointments and visits – there and then3. Integrate Systems

Busy staff are often overwhelmed with the amount of departments or agencies they have to collaborate with and the number of systems that they have to provide information to.

By failing to integrate these systems, workers spend many more hours than need be, rekeying data into multiple back-office systems – duplicating effort and creating the potential for mistakes and errors.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• Choose a mobile solution that can integrate and ‘communicate’ with any system. If implemented correctly this will mean that staff will only need to enter information into their mobile devices once, whereby the data then populates all relevant back-office systems automatically.
• Integrating mobile applications with scheduling systems is particularly powerful. The mobile software can updates the schedule with the emerging day information; allowing visits to be automatically redistributed between staff where visits over-run, customers are unavailable, appointments are cancelled etc.

4. Visibility of front line services

By failing to have visibility of operations in the field, organisations fail to respond to challenges as they happen and lose the opportunity to resolve them at minimum cost and disruption to the customer.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• Providing mobile devices enables you to track all the factors which impact field performance like: routing of employees, time spent onsite, incomplete jobs, missed appointments, lateness etc. This data can be used to analyse operations, fine tune the scheduling engine or to demonstrate ongoing improvements in efficiency.

5.Having customer information to hand

Arriving at the customer’s location without complete historical notes puts the service provider at a disadvantage when providing its services and is disappointing for customers who expect their service provider to have comprehensive knowledge of their relationship.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• By using mobile technology the appropriate notes can be delivered to the workers’ mobile devices when they are needed. This means a professional can provide a service with the continuity the customer would expect. It also reduces the risk of them not being able to deliver that service on their first visit.
• Organisations can allow historical records to be sent to field workers for that customer, allowing them to see full details of historic work completed with any certificates, photos, contracts that are relevant. They can also see future planned work future work. This minimises the risk of duplicating work that has already been done or will be done during the course of a contract.

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Laraine Geddes, Marketing Manager, Kirona explains how dynamic resource scheduling & mobile working can help you keep promises to customers...

Driving efficiencies in your organisation and ensuring the highest level of customer satisfaction do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Regardless of whether you are managing planned maintenance, reactive field based tasks or complex projects, efficiency comes from doing the right things, at the right time with the most appropriate resources. For the customer, what they want is exactly the same, for you to keep your promises, to perform and complete the task required when you say you will.

Kirona have outlined four ways in which organisations can deliver their promises to customers.

Setting expectations:

It is a careful balance to ensure that customer preferences for appointments are taken into account while also optimising resource utilisation and minimising travel time of operatives. When procuring dynamic resource scheduling software ensure it provides available appointment slots to be offered to customers, whilst highlighting the most efficient slots for the organisation in terms of resource utilisation and travel time.

Setting the right expectation & keeping promises can achieve Customer Satisfaction of 95% or higher.

Communicating with your customer:

One of the primary reasons for appointments being missed is no access to the property, often caused by the customer not being at home.

Kirona’s Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) makes it easy to keep customers informed. Each appointment can be confirmed by email or SMS, with reminders being sent at time intervals such as 24 or 48 hours before the job is due. When an operative updates the job on their mobile device to say that they are en-route to the property, an SMS can be sent to remind the customer.

There will always be exceptions that occur.

Whether it is an unavoidable overrun of a previous job or delays caused by traffic, it is essential that the customer is kept informed. Through the seamless and real-time integration of DRS and Kirona’s Job Manager mobile workforce application, such delays can be proactively managed with a communication sent to the customer informing them that their operative has been delayed and resetting expectations of when they will arrive. Not only does this approach reduce the negative impact on customers, it can also reduce calls from customers to your contact centre chasing progress.

 

North Lanarkshire Council’s no access rate dropped from 40% to just 3% through use of Kirona’s DRS and Job Manager.

Dealing with the emerging day:

No two days can be the same and it is common for events in the day, including emergency work, to require changes to the schedule. The challenge is to cater for overrunning work or new work items while keeping customer promises and also ensuring that you continue to operate in the most optimum way.

By utilising Kirona’s Job Manager as your mobile working solution integrated into Dynamic Resource Scheduling, you gain full visibility of the work being performed in the field. You can see in real-time potential delays and the impact that this will have on your intra-day schedule Rather than having to hold back emergency slots in your schedule or allocating emergency work on a first availability basis, DRS enables you to take a more efficient approach. As changes in the day occur, DRS re-evaluates the day’s plan, adjusting work allocation to take into account the emerging work or availability to ensure you maintain the most optimum work schedule across all available operatives.

Delivering a first time fix:

Not all jobs run to plan. A job can simply take longer than expected. The efficient way to deal with this is to provide the operative with the time they need to complete the task. This avoids an additional appointment being required and ensures that your original promise to the customer is kept.

Step one to increasing the rate of first time fix is ensuring that for each job you have the right operative, resources and time allocated. Key to this is an effective triage process that ensures you can define the key parameters used for scheduling work. Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) enables you to define different categories of skills and qualification of each operative and to align this to job requirements ensuring you always send the right operative.

 

When complications or work variations arise, the seamless integration of Job Manager (JM) and Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS), enables for this to be immediately notified to planners. With full visibility across all operatives of the day’s work and its progression, they are able to quickly sanction job variations and realign work items to ensure other customer commitments are met.

Field workforce automation tools such as dynamic resource scheduling and mobile working have had a significant impact on field service, with organisations that have adopted this technology consistently experiencing productivity improvements of 25% or more. However, these tools are not just capable of streamlining the way we currently work, they also provide us with a unique opportunity to do different things. All we need to do is unleash our imagination, says, Laraine Geddes, marketing manager, Kirona

Efficiency drives opportunity

By leveraging the highly sophisticated tools available,  field service organisations have the perfect platform from which to expand. Dynamic resource scheduling enables organisations to improve the way they plan and efficiently allocate resources to field based tasks to maximise capacity and minimise non-productive time. Empowering field workers with mobile technology has not just streamlined the way work is allocated to the field, with real-time updates delivered to centralised functions, but it has also equipped the field worker with the tools that make them more effective in the field.

The result is a far more efficient and effective field workforce. This not only has an impact on bottom line profitability, it also presents an opportunity to grow the breadth of and scale of services delivered in a highly profitable manner.

The customer experience

All of the great efforts on driving efficiencies can be lost if field service organisations lose sight of the customer experience. According to Accenture in 2013, 62% of consumers switched service providers due to a poor customer experience, and although not as extreme, it is a similar picture in the B2B world. Customer retention is vital, according to Emmet and Mark Murphy in their book ‘Leading On The Edge of Chaos’, just a 2% increase in customer retention has the same bottom line impact as a 10% reduction in cost.[quote float="left"]All of the great efforts on driving efficiencies can be lost if field service organisations lose sight of the customer experience.

Looking at ways to leverage technology to differentiate your customer experience should therefore be a focus of any field service organisation.

 

Using Dynamic Scheduling to provide customers with convenient appointments, using email and SMS to keep customers informed of when your field worker will arrive are all ways of delivering a great customer experience. But this can go even further, enabling customers to book appointments online, having deliveries scheduled at the time of purchase either within stores or online and enabling field-based workers to schedule follow-up appointments when they are with the customer all adds to the customer experience.

Driving new revenue opportunities

Happy customers present opportunity. When a customer has just received great service they have a far higher propensity to buy. By leveraging the field worker’s mobile device to prompt them with targeted up-sells for that client or customer, such as extended warranties, additional related products or follow-on services opens up the opportunity in a timely manner.

Being able to efficiently schedule resources enables you to offer premium services and SLA’s to your customers, generating additional revenues that you are confidently able to fulfil within your current capacity. This is where analytics is immensely valuable, enabling you to simulate different service offerings and understand in which regions and across which skills these can be provided.

Proactive service

Field Workforce Automation tools provide a fantastic opportunity for organisations to make that leap from being reactive to being proactive. Whether that be simply scheduling proactive tasks to complement reactive work, pushing real-time information to field-based engineers for preventative maintenance they should perform during a scheduled visit or filling any idle slots with proactive visits to customers.[quote float="right"]Field workforce automation tools provide a fantastic opportunity for organisations to make that leap from being reactive to being proactive.

 

Through driving efficiency in your workforce, you create additional capacity with existing resources, this additional capacity enables you to be proactive, all you need to do is understand how best to utilise this time to have the greatest positive impact on your customers and your business.
Whether you deliver goods, provide a facilities management service, offer field maintenance for business or consumers or deliver field-based professional services such as healthcare, you have an opportunity to be the best in your industry. Creating an efficient field service organisation and providing an exceptional customer experience does not have to be mutually exclusive, in fact, they can be highly complementary.

Ensuring you have the right technology in place to enable you to plan and schedule, to connect your field workers with your centralised systems and to analyse and gain true actionable insight into your operation is key. Using your imagination to use this technology to deliver greater value to customers and create new revenue streams enables you to set your company apart from the competition.

 

---

 

Be social and share this article