Your Housing Group (YHG), one of the UK’s largest housing providers with 28,000 homes, is set to transform the efficiency of their field force operations and customer experience with use of the FLS VISITOUR solution from FLS – FAST LEAN SMART.

Following a strategic business review that set new objectives forambitious operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction targets, YHG decided they needed a more sophisticated and robustdynamic scheduling solution that could integrate seamlessly with their Microsoft Dynamics 365 business platform and Accuserv repairs management system.

YHG AND FIX360 ARE USING FLS SOLUTIONS TO MEET BUSINESS-DRIVEN TIMESCALES AND MAKE SURE EVERY CUSTOMER CONTACT COUNTS.

The first priority is to deliver the solution for Fix360, the YHG dedicated property maintenance arm with circa 200 operatives covering the North of England, before expected progression across other business functions, for example surveyors and tenant liaison officers.

FLS was appointed to implement FLS VISITOUR after a formal tendering process with a requirement to drive forward the business ahead of the norm in the market. Darren Halliwell, YHG’s IT Director says “We did our research and were determined to find a technology and partner that aligned to our 5-year business plan and could flex and adapt as we develop and implement our wider technology roadmap. FLS have multi-sector experience and a stamp of approval from Microsoft which gave us great confidence. We were impressed by their delivery approach and speed to implementation alongside other key factors such as ease of configuration, functionally rich capabilities, customer communication and in-day progress and response accuracy and tooling. Following technical evaluation and discussion with references, including organisations in and out of sector, the FLS offering became our unanimous choice.”

Fix360 have over 3,000 categories of repair. Once a customer’s need is qualified by the call centre or via online self-service, FLS VISITOUR will provide the optimal appointment choices according to available operatives and existing commitments. This will utilise real-time optimisation, not just finding white-space to fill in the diary, with the accuracy of time-of-day traffic speeds for each journey. Each appointment will therefore be cost-effective, punctual, using operatives with the right skills and best possibility for first time fix.

Guy Bebbington, Managing Director of Fix360 says “The Fix360 Board have set ourselves challenging Customer Satisfaction and Value for Money targets and so investment in our technology stack to achieve those targets is vital. We believe FLS are absolutely the right partner for us, a real differentiator within the market. It was clear from references the quality of solution and expertise they offer, increasing field force efficiency and aiding continuous improvement in customer delight. At YHG and Fix360 we make sure every customer contact counts and this technology supports us with that. Other advantages included the speed in which we could implement and rollout to meet the business-driven timescales. We are really looking forward to working together and delivering great outcomes for our tenants in the weeks and months ahead.”

---

Further Reading:

• Read more about Digital Transformation @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/digital-transformation
• Read more about Fast Lean Smart on Field Service News @ www.fieldservicenews.com/FLS
• Find out more more about Fast Lean Smart @ www.fastleansmart.com/en
• Learn more about Your Housing Group @ www.yourhousinggroup.co.uk
• Follow Fast Lean Smart on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/company/fls-fast-lean-smart/

In the first in a new series of videos where we look at field service operations and technology within different industry sectors we talk to Gary Milne, of Healthcare at Home about the important work they undertake, how that has changed since the pandemic and why dynamic scheduling engine Fast Lean Smart (FLS) has been a crucial element in their ability to meet customer demands and plan for expansion

 

FLS - FAST LEAN SMART, UK Managing Director, Jeremy Squire shares his experience on the tools needed to overcome increasing last mile challenges...

Key to the success of your last mile service delivery is planning appointments (when applicable) and Engineer routes that are both achievable and efficient. Not all methods for this are equal and in this article we explore the alternative methods used by scheduling technologies and why you need a real-time appointment optimiser, even if you prefer to fix the jobs to Engineers on the day of service delivery.

With the right systems to support you, the appointment booking is opportunity to guide your customer to the most cost effective time slot for an Engineer with the right skills and parts.

Every Field Service software solution includes appointment booking and often describe this as ‘optimised’.  Look closely at how this is achieved, the majority are far from optimal and result in unachievable appointments, heavy involvement by Planners and Managers, and cause some Engineers to work excessive hours whilst others are under utilised. 

Which of these are familiar to your way of working? The good, the bad, the ugly…or the best!

 

The Ugly – ‘patch’ method

Engineers are assigned exclusive postcode patches and new appointments can be offered until the maximum daily limit is reached. There is often a long wait for an appointment, even though neighbouring Engineers have availability, and you can typically only offer full day timeslots. Before the day of service begins, the scheduling system or a Planner will put each diary in a good order for travel according to maps, or the Engineers do it themselves.

 

 

The Bad – ‘basic’ white space scheduler 

With this method engineers work within a maximum travel radius from a start point and there is overlap between coverage areas. Each engineer has a route optimised utilising a driving time calculation with speeds according to road type. Timeslot options for a new appointment are calculated by the system finding ‘white space’ in the existing diary of suitable engineers and presenting best (lowest cost) choices based on deviation from current route – the job is then inserted into the chosen place in the diary.

Periodically, every few hours or overnight, you run the scheduler which will move jobs between the engineers for better routes and efficiency.

The comparison appointment costs given by this method are inaccurate because they do not consider the overall schedule so you end up ignoring them and just offer up any of the available slots, even if this was 2 hours driving one day or 10 minutes the next. Diaries may appear full which causes a long lead time to attend appointments, but running the scheduler later reveals availability was there all along – too late!

 

The Good – ‘enhanced’ white space scheduler

The ‘enhanced’ is based on the same principles as the ‘basic’ but smarter. Routes are more accurate using travel times with actual average speeds for each road segment according to the time of day. It is still just looking for white space in the diary but, after the appointment is booked, it will re-optimise this and nearby routes, moving jobs between engineers, ready for the next appointment request. 

Whilst this is more accurate than the ‘basic’ method, the comparison of appointment costs is still incorrect for the same reason. Also, an appointment that is calculated unavailable might actually be available if the ‘real-time’ method was used.

 

The Best – ‘real-time’ appointment optimiser

This method is truly best-of-breed. The schedule is always optimised with time of day traffic based travel speeds. For an appointment request, the system performs a real-time optimisation for each time slot requested, incorporating all relevant Engineers and jobs. It advises the difference in cost for adding this job into the fully optimised schedule for each available time slot.

To be practical in a customer service environment this must be achieved in seconds, even for high volumes, which is why there are few vendors able to offer this.

This is the only method that enables your customer service team (or self-service portal) to correctly offer and guide customers to pick the most cost effective time slot choices – resulting in mileage reduction and time for more jobs.

The real-time optimisation will also reveal time slots are available when all other methods would say the diary is full - reducing the average time to attend an appointment.

With this approach, you always know the planned schedule is accurate ready for last mile delivery - your Engineers will be happy with the plan and you are less likely to have challenges during the day of service or let customers down. Planners can be reassigned to customer service roles and  Managers can instead focus on quality of service.

The benefits of a ‘real-time’ appointment optimiser for your last mile service delivery are clear and we at FLS are so confident that we offer to facilitate you to prove this in live operation before commitment.

 

Customer proof

As Richard Wilson, IT Director HomeServe Boiler Installations comments, “We wanted a more dynamic tool, one that could continuously optimise, looking at every appointment and every field worker collectively and scheduling everything in the most optimal way.”

And the results - “FLS has enabled us to get to our appointments 25% quicker than we were. It’s really highlighted how efficient your scheduling can be when intelligent software does it for you. We see FLS as a growth facilitator. The efficiency gains are such that we’re now in a position to scale up”

It’s been over three years since Baywater Healthcare implemented FAST LEAN SMART’s flagship scheduling and route optimisation solution, FLS VISITOUR, for their logistics and field service operations. The software has since enabled them to increase their efficiency, solve some significant planning challenges, give a better service to their patients, and win new contracts.

In the Big Discussion we bring together a panel of industry experts and focus on one key topic within the field service sector.
In the final part of our series on dynamic scheduling our panellists, FieldAware's Mark Tatarsky and Fast Lean Smart's Chris Welsh are asked if SMEs can also benefit from optimised scheduling.

Can smaller and medium sized organisations benefit from optimised scheduling, or is it only beneficial for enterprise-level field service providers?

Marc Tatarsky, SVP Marketing, FieldAware
Advances in cloud computing, multi-tenant SaaS solutions, and new micro and macro optimised scheduling capabilities enable optimised scheduling to scale down. Optimization is now an effective solution for organizations of all sizes.

Micro optimisation enables service delivery firms to build a library of business policies that can be used to tune the optimiser to create a work schedule for an individual team or region. The business policy contains the rules that ensure competing business objectives are balanced appropriately. The rules ensure the right field technicians are considered for the work while managing business objectives such as limiting travel time, delivering priority work, or balancing the number of jobs across the team. 

The business policy library can cover how the team should work in various business scenarios. These can include an emergency schedule; prioritising installations at the end of the reporting period to assist in achieving revenue targets; during seasonal changes, etc.

Running the service delivery business is easier when you select the business policies you want to apply to different teams and then change them as needed to reflect the changes in their business. The benefits of accelerating time to value and reducing the cost and complexity of maintenance that a micro optimised schedule provides small and medium sized organisations equally apply to the enterprise.


Chris Welsh, Director, FLS – FAST LEAN SMART
Yes, most definitely, optimised scheduling will help even small service operations that are performing multiple jobs per day to be more efficient and deliver reliable customer service – essential in an ever more competitive industry where customer expectations are rising.

Even with a handful of engineers, there are thousands or millions of possible permutations for job assignment and most providers will resort to allocating work according to postcode patches. This makes it easy to allocate jobs but the ‘hard borders’ between resources can be the greatest inefficiency for field service delivery and you might turn down an appointment request that was actually achievable and cost effective. 

An optimised schedule considers all resources and travel time without these hard borders and, in my experience of performing scheduling tests, an optimised schedule compared to a manual schedule will typically reveal a 25%-50% reduction in mileage whilst making sure appointments agreed are achievable - that might be 1 to 2 hours saving per day for the engineer to do that extra job.
Perhaps equally important, only engineers with the right skills and parts turn up and engineers get home on time! This contributes to greater employee engagement and to the success of the company.

In the Big Discussion we bring together a panel of industry experts and focus on one key topic within the field service sector.
In the third of a four part series on dynamic scheduling our panellists, FieldAware's Mark Tatarsky and Fast Lean Smart's Chris Welsh identify the biggest mistakes companies make when implementing a scheduling system.

What is the biggest mistake field service companies make when implementing scheduling solutions?

Marc Tatarsky, SVP Marketing, FieldAware
Companies often expect a ‘silver bullet.’ They aren’t prepared for the challenges that come with a successful implementation. One problem is capturing the implicit decision-making processes used by dispatchers today. Another is looking at how those processes can be enhanced to take advantage of new optimisation capabilities.

These tasks can seem daunting but are essential to define the rules and objectives of the optimisation engine and give valuable results. However, by phasing the implementation initially with manual or semi-automated scheduling, service organizations can achieve faster adoption while simultaneously creating a positive environment.

The company can define what it wants to accomplish by implementing schedule optimization so that it can give appropriate weighting to seeminglyconflicting objectives. FSM vendors have a parallel role to play here. To minimize friction during adoption, vendors should create intuitive workflows.

These workflows include setting up rules, objectives, working time, etc. Vendors can also help instil confidence in the solution by providing feedback and visualisation of optimization results. These metrics allow dispatchers to compare manual and optimized schedules.

Chris Welsh, Director, FLS – FAST LEAN SMART
The biggest mistake is not managing the ‘rate of change’. A company decides it’s objectives for performance improvement, chooses a new technology to enable automation and new processes. However, it is important to understand and manage the perception, challenges and priorities of all the stakeholders: the customer, the management team, the back office and the field force.

Introducing a scheduling solution is best considered as a journey with continuous improvement, ensuring the entire service team are engaged and ‘bought in’ along the way and change taken in steps that the business can consume. It is also important to have a system with transparent visibility of how scheduling decisions were made so users will understand and have confidence in the results.

With system design, focus on the fundamentals with a pilot area to begin with and then listen and learn from feedback. At FLS we offer this stage ‘precontract’ so there is no doubt in the technology, the business case, and what is required for deployment.

Next you refine/improve based on these learnings, show you take feedback onboard, and expand the use. Sometimes company improvements are not obvious for individuals who only see their own workload. Measuring and reporting overall statistics is therefore important not only for ROI calculation but also for positivity across the service team.

The final part of the big discussion will be published next week, when the panel are asked if SMEs can also benefit from optimised scheduling. You can read the first part of the discussion here and the second part here. 

In the Big Discussion we bring together a panel of industry experts and focus on one key topic within the field service sector.
In the second of a four part series on dynamic scheduling our panellists, FieldAware's Mark Tatarsky and Fast Lean Smart's Chris Welsh, ponder if optimised scheduling should be an accepted part of a wider FSM platform.

Should optimised scheduling still be considered as a best-of-breed solution or should it now be an expectation of wider FSM platforms?

Marc Tatarsky, SVP Marketing, FieldAware
The most significant expense for a service organisation is the cost of its field resources. In a hyper-competitive market where service delivery is a crucial differentiator, service organisations must excel at customer service delivery whilst sustaining high levels of operational productivity.

Given these increased pressures, an optimised scheduler is a core feature of any world-class FSM platform. Ensuring work schedules are compliant, deliver the intended service to the end customer, and are operationally efficient is essential.

Traditionally, providing this depth of capability was cost-prohibitive for an FSM platform. Implementation projects were either too lengthy or too complex to configure an optimizer efficiently.

Modern, micro optimisation capabilities enable service delivery companies to quickly and cost-effectively implement optimised scheduling at a team level. Moreover, for those workflows needing a manual or semi-automated scheduling, advanced FSM tools also provide options such as Planning Mode.

This capability allows schedules to be built and adjusted in a safe environment either manually or through interactive optimisation cycles. When the Planner or Dispatcher is satisfied with the scheduling outcomes, they can publish and dispatch the approved schedule to the field technician’s mobiles following the team’s dispatch policy. 

Chris Welsh, Director, FLS – FAST LEAN SMART
Making do with scheduling included in an FSM platform might seem logical, however the benefit can be so great that best-of-breed is the way to go. Not only does schedule optimisation minimise cost, it also helps ensure you can deliver on the increasing service expectations of your customers.

In 2019, I believe it reasonable to set the minimum bar at the following capabilities to describe field service scheduling as ‘optimised’: 
1. Dynamic schedule optimisation to incorporate all engineers and jobs over a substantial radius, not just assigning work to an engineer because it’s their patch or have a space to fill in the diary;
2. Route calculation with actual average driving speeds for each road segment according to the time of day.

FLS are one of the few companies with this expertise, honing our solutions for over 25 years to provide the fastest, leanest and smartest configurable algorithms that can be integrated easily into any established FSM solution or new project.

Our customers are using most of the leading FSM/CRM/ERP technologies and FLS are happy to prove the benefit free of charge, starting with a scheduling test to compare how FLS VISITOUR would have scheduled your work - expect to be amazed at the unlocked potential!

The third part of the big discussion will be published next week, when the panel diagnose the biggest mistakes companies make when implementing a scheduling system. You can read the first part of the discussion here. 

In the Big Discussion we bring together a panel of industry experts and focus on one key topic within the field service sector.
In the first of a new four part series, we turn our attention to dynamic scheduling where our panel includes FieldAware's Mark Tatarsky and Fast Lean Smart's Chris Welsh...

Given the increasing challenges of last-mile service delivery, how crucial is optimised scheduling for field service excellence?

Marc Tatarsky, SVP Marketing, FieldAware
As markets become hyper-competitive, service delivery has become a key differentiator in winning and retaining customers.
Delivering consistent, high-quality service in the last mile is essential. New sources of competition are entering from different verticals, and service organisations are required to support a broader range of products, service offerings, and customers across both metropolitan and rural regions.

These increasing competitive pressures have service organizations turning to optimized scheduling to improve the delivery of their service commitments. Optimized scheduling now encapsulates the workflows, decision-making processes, and the criteria service providers use to execute on the customer journey and create genuine differentiation consistently.  

Key to this approach is new generation optimisation engines. These modern optimisation tools provide the ability to configure “micro scheduling.” These new tools enable providers to uniquely configure optimisation capabilities to support different team sizes, multiple product lines, as well as regional and seasonality needs.

This approach of building business policies that reflect optimisation needs at an atomic level provides the basis for rapid time to value. Micro scheduling not only facilitates efficient execution of the initial implementation, but it also helps with the introduction of new service lines, products, and regions. It enables service providers to react to and create a competitive advantage based on changes in the market and seasonal demands.

Chris Welsh, Director, FLS – FAST LEAN SMART
Last mile service delivery has always relied on good scheduling for field service excellence. With increasing pressure to achieve more with less and time-window/SLA expectations shortening, it is harder than ever to achieve this well without a schedule optimiser.

The best scheduling technology will not only plan accurately but also have ability to dynamically react in real-time to the progress of travel and work changes on the day. Engineer job allocation will re-optimise automatically to ensure priorities, including emergency jobs, are best met within available resources, highlighting SLA’s or appointments that will be missed so a Planner can override by exception.

This dynamic operation does not suit all service businesses and the technology is flexible. For example, many appointment based companies want the schedule finalised and ‘fixed’ for engineers the night before.

In this case the system will display real-time progress and give accurate prediction of when appointment windows will not be met or the engineer late home. By exception, the company may then decide to reassign using system recommendations.

The further importance for optimised scheduling is the ability to provide auto notification of arrival times and Uber-style tracking the engineer’s arrival by the customer on their phone. FLS were ahead when we launched this with FLS Portal last year and the function is increasingly an expectation for field service. 

The second part of the big discussion will be published next week, when the panel are asked if optimised scheduling should be an accepted part of a wider FSM platform.

Freight Transport Association (FTA) is transforming its Vehicle Inspection Service (VIS) by deploying FAST LEAN SMART (FLS) real-time automated software to introduce a new, more efficient work scheduling process in conjunction with Microsoft Dynamics 365.