AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Nick Shipton

Nick Shipton, Dynamic Resource Scheduling Executive, Kirona explains the importance of understanding your providers own roadmap for development when selecting a field service management solution...

The last piece I wrote for FSN focused on how I believe it’s important to utilise a scheduler that is flexible enough to allow for an organisation to cope with the different types of demand whilst still enabling customer expectations to be met and being as efficient as possible regarding how that demand is dispatched to the workforce.

For a leading field service scheduling software vendor ensuring that the software we provide ticks all these boxes is a challenge. We need to be certain that we are meeting our customer’s expectations by providing not only excellent support and service but also an innovative roadmap that keeps them engaged and moving forward on the solution ensuring they maximise their ROI and continue to deliver further efficiencies.

However there is also the need to look to new markets and prospects whose needs may differ from those of our core business.

The key is that we need to look at the solution as an enabler that enables our customers to retain a position that is at the forefront of their markets, whether that is in giving them a commercial edge or in the case of our customers in the public sector enabling them to cope with the additional strain on services, cuts in budgets and yet still give their customers the best possible service.

 

At Kirona we of course have a roadmap looking at the short, medium and long-term but for me its key that we look outside of our own internal team to drive the content of these, especially in regards to the short and medium term roadmap.

The long term roadmap is more strategic but still contains some customer consultation.

We have an excellent internal team on both the scheduling and mobile products who are constantly looking at new features driven by their own knowledge of our technology, the knowledge of our customer base and knowledge of new advances in our field.

However it’s very important that we don’t get too carried away before trying to understand whether our innovation is relevant to the customers and prospects needs.

Quite often you’ll find that exciting new features in products are great for the Sales Team as they look good in demos but when it comes to the day to day operations we find that users never see the benefits they were expecting.

For this reason at Kirona we always look to use the excellent forum of our user group to both plot and direct our roadmap.

Over half of our roadmap is fed by ideas and requirements from our current user base, and we also ensure that in every update we have between 30% and 50% of customer lead enhancements as this is key to ensuring that the product stays relevant for our customers, as listening to our customers is key and one of the main reasons we have such great customer retention and satisfaction.

Coming back to my original point, how do we as a software company ensure that what we offer gives the customer the flexibility they need in the product, and ensure that we as a company don’t go down a route that only offers a solution to a niche market.

For the answer to that question it’s about ensuring that we are selling into a diverse range of markets, but with the caveat that we always sense check whether any new market and new functionality for that market could be used across our customer base.

This extends further when you then look at our user group, which five years ago was exclusively public sector organisations and from that sector almost primarily housing repairs, whereas now we have representation from retail, healthcare, utilities, central government and facilities management organisations.

 

The important point for us as a software company is that all these different sectors are using the same suite of products just configured to suit their own needs and requirements, and from our customers point of view they get to see how other organisations are not just using the software in a different way but also that actually the goals and requirements of organisations from different sectors are not too far away from their own.

So in conclusion I feel it is very important that when looking for software its key that you don’t just look at the solution itself, you need to ensure that the solution isn’t getting stuck in a cul-de-sac and the provider is challenging themselves, their customers and their prospects to offer you a future.

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Nick Shipton of scheduling specialists Kirona outlines why flexibility is as much a key ingredient in scheduling as optimisation...

Mobilising field based staff is high on the agenda at the moment with many organisations looking to increase the effectiveness and efficiencies of their workforce alongside offering increased levels of customer service and satisfaction.

It is obviously key that in order to mobilise your field staff effectively a complimentary scheduling solution is required to efficiently organise the jobs before dispatching them at the appropriate time to the mobile device.

However, what is sometimes overlooked is an understanding that that scheduling solution may need to react to different types of work in different ways, and therefore it’s key that the solution offers flexible methods of scheduling to suit how you need to drive your organisation.

Organisations often offer a wide range of services to their customers which can result in diverse requirements in terms of how those services need to be accessed by the customer and how that demand needs to be planned, which can cause issues if your scheduler has been built to suit a particular vertical or service, and drives you to fit the service to the schedulers constraints rather than configure the schedule to suit the requirements.

Some services will require fairly simple allocation of one off tasks based on matching skill-sets to the type of work, but if you throw into the mix customers expecting appointments at the first point of contact whether that is via a phone call or self-service this simple offering becomes much more complex, especially if you also want to throw into the mix planned works and programmed works.

 

The key with offering an appointed service is that you need to be able to offer and steer the customer towards taking a slot which not only satisfies them in terms of service levels but also takes into account all the other jobs in the system at that point in time, and allows you at that first point of contact to firstly offer the most efficient slot for you organisation, therefore building in maximum efficiency for the workforce.

Even if your organisation has only a small proportion of these ‘fixed’ appointed jobs they become the key jobs in the solution to plan other work around that has a more flexible time window, as we can’t break the direct promise we’ve made to the customer via that appointment.

Generally planned works have a more flexible planning window so we may need to carry out the job within the next X days or complete the jobs once a week, or once a month but we are not too worried about when we carry it out within that period.

Most scheduling systems will handle this well as there is plenty of flexibility within the large planning window to continually optimise your routes until you are satisfied with the schedule, but if you have an appointment to satisfy then that can throw an expensive spanner in the works as the scheduler doesn’t have the ability to move it where it may want to.

To further complicate matters other services may be carrying out far more complex works such as those which have dependencies and sequencing of tasks required to ensure they are carried not only in the most efficient manner but also in the correct order, or have a service that needs to deal with a very high volume of jobs with a short duration within small geographical locations.

All of the above pose different scheduling questions and of course you could look at implementing different solutions for these different scenarios however you lose the ability to get a complete view of the workforce and lose the ability to look at whether further efficiencies can be gained by carrying out more work at one location whilst you have resources there.

Reporting also becomes a trickier task as you are unable to easily view within one system how different services or regions may be performing.

Analysis can then be done to look if the location and levels of field based staff are correct and whether with a slight adjustment to these levels and locations performance can be improved.

You can also start to look at hierarchical KPI’s, so right down to operative level we can start to look at where and how the business can be improved.

The ability to implement a truly flexible scheduling solution such as Kirona’s DRS not only allows you to both improve the day to day operation of the organisation but also analyse how it can continually improve.

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Nick Shipton of scheduling specialists Kirona takes a look at the importance of measuring performance and constantly shifting KPI focus in a journey of ongoing improvement...

Kirona recently collaborated with Field Service News and Bill Pollock from Strategies for Change, hosting an interesting webinar covering the key points raised in Bill’s field service benchmarking report.

During the webinar we discussed key trends across field service in terms of what organisation are looking to implement and improve in the future.

The most popular item on the agenda for UK and European organisations was to develop and improve metrics or KPI’s to measure performance.

The thought here was that organisations need to be measuring things better in order to improve and help with the following:

Customer demand for quicker response time

• Workforce utilisation & productivity
• Service process efficiencies
• Customer demand for improved asset availability

 

This if course is all very commendable and is absolutely the correct things to be striving for however, is developing new and improved ways for measuring what we are doing actually going to help us achieve these goals, or does it simply stop short and tell us simply how are we are doing today, last month, last year?

Back office systems, scheduling solutions and mobile solutions give us a whole wealth of potential data to look at and report upon (although those organisations who are yet to jump into the world of scheduling and mobile will only have the very basics), but are we using this data to the best of its ability.

Traditional KPI’s are great for telling us how we are doing now, allowing us to answer the question is the business performing to set metrics? But they stop short of actually giving any insight into how we can improve?

 

The setting of targets doesn’t answer the questions that allow us to improve, it merely creates a benchmark.

Having access to information that addresses; I am meeting the set number of field service jobs I need to complete today that’s great but could I do better if the organisation was configured differently.

The key point is that KPI’s are just a set of controls we like to put into a business to give us some comfort that we are running on track, which is as I say great but do they actually give us any view on how we could improve and deliver a better service to our customers, even if we are doing well.

For us at Kirona it’s about taking that wealth of data we have and giving tools to our customers  that not only allow them to look at the standard KPI’s to ensure they are on track but also to allow them to start analysing where they could get better and implement those improvements.

If you only currently have only a fairly static back office system your ability to get access to meaningful data is going to be very limited, however with scheduling and mobile solutions such as Kirona’s DRS and Kirona’s Job Manager solution you suddenly have an extra dimension to the quantity, quality and type of data available.

Analysing this in the correct way then allows an organisation to start pinpointing exactly where efficiencies in the business could be made.

This extra dimension of data enables the organisation to understanding questions such as;

 

• We may be completing our set number of jobs per day, but actually how much is it costing us to do that?
• Are some geographical areas better performing than others?
• Can we improve this by looking at the distribution of our workforce across those areas?
• Am I giving my customers the most efficient times for appointments for my organisation, and can I improve this without impacting my service?
• Am I deficient in certain skills and abilities in different regions?

 

Are we selling or completing certain services in specific areas of our region and therefore do we need to move the workforce around to support that, or could we be offering a higher level of service in those service areas?

In conclusion I believe what organisations should be looking at in addition to developing new and improved ways of measuring performance, is actually looking at ways at tools that enable your organisation to analyse your business to help improve your performance, without impacting on efficiency, keeping customers happy and attracting new customers.

 

Also if you want to keep ahead of your competitors, hitting your targets isn’t going to do this, the only way to do this is to continually challenge those targets, continual improve your business and analyse what the data is telling you.

Look beyond your KPI’s!

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature