Tesseract’s Sales Director Kevin McNally, with over 15 year’s experience in the industry, explores the key elements with Kris Oldland Editor of Field Service News...
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Oct 25, 2017 • Features • assisted scheduling • Contract Management • Kevin McNally • optimised scheduling • dynamic scheduling • scheduling • Software and Apps • software and apps • Asolvi
Tesseract’s Sales Director Kevin McNally, with over 15 year’s experience in the industry, explores the key elements with Kris Oldland Editor of Field Service News...
Want to know more? A white paper on this topic is available for Field Service News subscribers only - but if you are a Field Service Professional you may well qualify for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription!
Click here to apply for your subscription now and we’ll send you the white paper to your inbox now instantly as a thank you for your time!
[dropcap]F[/dropcap]ield Service Management technology has become essential to service delivery excellence. Service excellence is no longer a USP but a baseline requirement. However, whilst technologies such as IoT and Augmented Reality are grabbing the headlines their potential is greatly diminished unless you have a fundamental layer of technology in place already.
This two part article explores what to expect from a FSM system and offers best-practice tips to help you get the most from your investment...
Contract Management:
[quote]“The starting piece for everything is the contract and the control of the contract. Without that in place it is very difficult to bring everything else on top of that.” Kevin McNally, Tesseract.
Contract management is often viewed as the starting point of almost everything within field service management operations. Without a view of your service contracts you cannot have to hand the answers for critical questions such as:
- What is the SLA on any given contract?
- Is a client under warranty or do they have an enhanced level of service contract
- Does a contract include spare parts and/or consumables?
- Is the service contract due for renewal?[/unordered_list]
You could be at risk of potentially not meeting your client’s expectations and so putting the potential of renewing or upselling service to that client in danger in the future – or on the other side of the coin, you could be giving valuable service away for free.
From the point of view of understanding the assets and also the entitlement that the customer is due as we go through a process of raising a service call or indeed, raising a sales order, we need to fundamentally understand what we should be doing with the entitlement for each specific client.
Scheduling:
[quote]Optimised Scheduling in our world tends to be more geared to the planned maintenance aspects of service calls – i.e. for those companies who are looking to do things in advance and are looking for the best possible route to achieve this – Kevin McNally, Tesseract
Scheduling comes in a number of different guises and the various different names given to types of scheduling options can be a somewhat confusing but broadly scheduling will come in three flavours:
- Assisted Scheduling: Assisted Schedulers are essentially a manual tool, that as the name denotes offer a layer of assistance to the dispatcher making their job that little bit easier and thus increasing efficiency.
- Optimised Scheduling: With an optimised scheduling tool most of the work is done by the system. It will search through the scheduled service jobs and the available engineers and pull together an optimised work schedule for the day taking into account things like travel times and distances, priority jobs and field engineer skillsets etc. However, when things fall outside of established parameters, it is down to the dispatcher to make necessary adjustments to the schedule to make sure SLAs are met etc.
- Dynamic Scheduling: Dynamic scheduling is a further evolution of optimised scheduling that draws in data from mobile applications and telematics data etc to continuously revise the schedule throughout the day, reacting to situations such as a delayed engineer and reallocating jobs to ensure that the days schedule is continuously optimised.[/unordered_list]
Ultimately, when it comes to scheduling, it really is a case of horses for courses and establishing what is the best fit for your organisation.
Whilst not all companies will see a need for a dynamic scheduler, all but the smallest of organisations can benefit from at least some form of optimisation within their scheduling solution and the efficiencies that can be delivered are significant so it is an area of your FSM solution that you should get to understand and know fully.
Want to know more? A white paper on this topic is available for Field Service News subscribers only - but if you are a Field Service Professional you may well qualify for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription!
Click here to apply for your subscription now and we’ll send you the white paper to your inbox now instantly as a thank you for your time!
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Apr 25, 2016 • Features • assisted scheduling • resources • White Paper • White Papers & eBooks • Exel Computer Systems • scheduling • Software and Apps
Resource Type: White Paper Published by: Field Service News (sponsored by Exel Computer Systems) Title: The helping hands of field service management Download: Click here to download white paper
Resource Type: White Paper
Published by: Field Service News (sponsored by Exel Computer Systems)
Title: The helping hands of field service management
Download: Click here to download white paper
By downloading you agree to the T&Cs listed available here
Synopsis
How to stay ahead of the ever-changing suite of Field Service Management (FSM) tools, including a focus on exactly what is the latest development of Assisted Scheduling?
Overview
The need for companies to employ some form of scheduling engine is clear, the benefits of adopting such an approach are thoroughly documented and clearly tangible. Introducing some level of automation will certainly deliver improvement in field service efficiency and productivity.
Indeed, the introduction of any level of optimisation within the dispatch role will inevitably lead to the reduction of fuel consumption costs that can make a compelling argument for implementation, for even the most cautious of financial directors.
The pile of case studies available to read extolling the benefits of scheduling are stacked high and readily available – each of them stuffed with positive examples and statistics to back up the claims FSM providers make, including how quickly companies have seen a return on their investment.
And of course the benefits of improved scheduling go far beyond the elements that are so clearly identified on a P&L. Customer satisfaction levels are often dramatically increased with the introduction of such tools.
The benefits of improved scheduling go far beyond the elements that are so clearly identified on a P&L.Customer satisfaction levels are often dramatically increased with the introduction of such tools.
With customer satisfaction becoming one of the key differentiators between you and your competition in this current age of information, the investment in a good scheduling engine that can empower your team to deliver top tier service could appear to be ever more vital.
Imagine if every person within your team could effectively schedule a service call...
This white paper takes a look at the on-going evolution of field service scheduling systems from manual solutions through to fully dynamic and automated optimised solutions, exploring some of the benefits and challenges of each.
It also then takes a closer look at the latest type of solution appearing 'assisted scheduling' and assesses whether this approach found in a number of next-gen solutions bridges the gap between those scheduling engines which are sometimes seen as prohibitively complex and expensive and those that offer little in the way of true optimisation.
Do assisted scheduling solutions offer a perfect balance for smaller and mid-sized organisation between the efficiency improvements of a high end solution and the human intuition of an expert dispatch agent? Finally the white paper touches on some of the other factors within a wider field service management system that can enable companies to truly take advantage of their scheduling system- be it manual, assisted or fully dynamic.
Field Service News is published by 1927 Media Ltd, an independent publisher whose sole focus is on the field service sector. As such our entire resources are focused on helping drive the field service sector forwards and aiming to best serve our industry through honest, incisive and innovative media coverage of the global field service sector.
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