White Paper Overview: Driving Productivity in Field Service

Sep 13, 2015 • Features • Advanced Field Service • Future of FIeld Service • future of field service • Kirona • resources • White Papers & eBooks • scheduling

Resource Type: White Paper
Published by: Kirona
Title: Driving Productivity in Field Service
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Synopsis

This white paper from Kirona highlights the benefits of integrating automated scheduling with a mobile working solution.

Overview

Leveraging the power of an integrated scheduling and mobile working solution that reduces travel and idle time, streamlines processes and ultimately increases the number of jobs/deliveries/visits completed per day per field worker can deliver average productivity improvements of 20% and sometimes even higher.

Rostering vs scheduling

Rostering ensures that you have enough people to fulfil the demand at any point in time. Scheduling ensures those people are doing the right things at the right time.

Best-in-class service organisation achieve 81% performance in worker utilisation Scheduling enables you to take into account when allocating work such a location and skill set.

Real productivity gains only come when making the step change from rostering to scheduling. Best-in-class service organisation achieve 81% performance in worker utilisation Scheduling enables you to take into account when allocating work such a location and skill set.

The order in which work is schedule can have a significant impacto productivity. If you have a team of 100 workers doing 5 jobs a day, there are 1 billio possible combinations of how those jobs could be allocated

Minimise travel time

Travel time can be the greatest source of productivity leakage. Reducing the travel time of field workers by just 10% per day can, on average, increase productivity by as much as one additional average job per day.

Kirona strongly recommends that journey planning needs to be fully integrated into the scheduling process and that it takes into account the actual route between jobs and incorporates traffic information.

Addressing no access

An efficient schedule drives productivity improvements, but only if customers keep appointments and field workers are able to gain access. Integrating scheduling with customer communication can increase the number of appointments kept and update customers on arrival times.

Streamlining Workflow Paperwork, rekeying data, manual workflows and not having access to key information are all factors that are detrimental to the productivity of your field workforce. The benefits of having a seamless mobile working solution far outweighs the investment required.

Access to the right information empowers a results-driven workforce. According to Aberdeen Group’s Field Service 2014 report, best-in-class service organisations achieved an 88% first time fix performance

Handling the emerging day

The daily challenge for field service organisations is how deal with the unexpected without compromising productivity or letting customers down. According to the McKinsey Improving Workforce Productivity, an average 5-10% of jobs are cancelled each day an 10-20% or tasks run shorter or longer than expected.

According to the McKinsey Improving Workforce Productivity, an average 5-10% of jobs are cancelled each day an 10-20% or tasks run shorter or longer than expected.

Managing this requires real-time visibility of your engineers and a dynamic scheduling app that allows you to move work allocation one job at a time.

Leveraging Actionable Insight

Comprehensive insight, acting on it and measuring the impact is the key to driving continuous productivity improvement. Benchmarking individual performance and task times, analysis of capacity vs demand and understanding geographic coverage all are key productivity drivers.

Conclusions

Field workforce automation software is key to driving productivity. The technology is proven, deployment does not have to be complex and there are significant gains to be made.

We have seen time after time that by leveraging Dynamic Resource Scheduling combined with Mobile Working, organisations on average see an uplift in productivity of 20%.

Yet the value does not stop there. These organisations also see an improvement in first time fix, a reduction in no-access, reduced administration overhead and measurable improvements in customer satisfaction. The field service activities become far more predictable and so too does performance.

Every aspect of work can be measured, analysed and lessons learned to drive continuous performance. According to Aberdeen Group, a best in class service organisation is defined by its ability to achieve 81% or greater workforce utilisation, 88% or better first time fix and a 90% or better customer satisfaction.