ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘features’ CATEGORY

IDC’s Aly Pinder tackles one of the core challenges of modern field service as the Internet of Things potentially brings new vulnerabilities to the perennial cyber security channels...

While Augmented Reality (AR) offers a range of benefits, why do challenges around its implementation still exist? Field Service News’ Deputy Editor Mark Glover explores some of the technology’s major milestones, including its role in the industrial environment, and asks what’s needed to make it a ubiquitous part of an engineer’s toolkit...

Copperberg’s Thomas Igou outlines the four key technologies that he believes are going to be shaping the future of the aftermarket in the coming years...

Service has been revolutionised within the last decade particularly by the introduction of smart devices both in the home and at work. This offers an opportunity to help guide your customers along the customer journey, building deeper relationships as you do writes Bill Pollock...

What reality are you using in your service programme? Virtual or augmented? Or are you leaning towards mixed? Mark Glover attempts to simplify the technology while keeping an eye on the real world.

In a hyper competitive market, enterprises across every sector are looking for any advantage to get ahead of the competition and meet customers’ expectations. Innovation has become central to success, particularly for enterprises that rely on a mobile workforce. Derek Bryan, VP, EMEA at Verizon Connect explains more...

Tech giants Google and Microsoft have released practical hands-free Augmented Reality devices aimed solely at enterprise. The hardware could spark an AR revolution in service, prompting boards to consider a technology that may, at one point, seemed a risk. Mark Glover considers what impact this could mean for service professionals when putting together a use-case for AR's adoption...

Michael Blumberg outlines why good Service Lifecycle Management infrastructure is the key to generating exceptional aftermarket revenue...

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.