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Workforce optimisation specialists Leadent Solutions have recently launched a new health-check service for companies operating a mobile workforce to ensure they are getting the most out of their existing systems and processes. In this series we will be looking into the various stages of the health check. Here in this first instalment of this series Emma Newman, Managing Consultant with Leadent Solutions, looks at the perhaps the most important element of any field service company, it's people.

There is also an accompanying video interview series Emma Newman the first instalment of which you can see here.

Your operational business may be about maintaining and repairing assets, it may be about resolving customer issues, or both.  Without doubt, you will be looking to improve the performance of your assets or service to customers.

You will be concerned that the right work is being done by your field-based workforce, that engineer productivity is maximised, that idle time and travel are reduced, and that cost and risk to the business are minimised. You may be aware of issues with your operations, be they related to performance, process non-compliance, behaviour or systems.  Given the breadth of processes involved in getting an engineer to site and completing work, covering planning, asset and job management, customer management, scheduling and deployment, and job execution, there may be issues that are, so far, unknown.

 

Many of us are car drivers.  When the car is not working it gets a visit to the garage.

However, we also know that keeping your car regularly serviced means that you avoid unexpected breakdowns, costly repairs or even worse, a completely new purchase. The principles relating to car servicing can, and should, be applied to field-based operations.  In this exclusive five part series we aim to explain why and how checking the health of your field-based operations can avoid short-term crises and result in greater long term value.

Across this series we will explore the following four areas...

1. People
2. Process
3. Systems
4. Improvement Planning (Planning for the Journey)

In this first article in the series we take a look at ‘People’, and their role in your business operations.  Subsequent articles will cover Process, Systems and Improvement Planning, and will finally be followed up by a case study which highlights how Leadent Solutions worked with Anglian Water to review and improve the set-up of their scheduling system.

Part 1: Focus on People

If you’re responsible for operating field-based services to maintain or fix assets, or ensure service delivery to customers then you already know that people are your most important resource.

Ideally it’s the planners, call centre agents, schedulers, job deployers, customer liaison agents, as well as the field workforce that ensure processes are adhered to and systems updated accordingly.

Well thought-out, practical, yet innovative processes and solutions can lead to far more effective field-based operations, and with recent advances in technology, the benefits and cost saving opportunities just keep getting better.  This is great news for any organisation seeking to drive business improvements from the activities of its fieldforce.

 

Innovation and transformation, who wouldn’t want that?  However, we see many transformation programmes focus on technology and process, but fail on the people aspect.  This often results in processes not being adhered to and workarounds being put in place, where systems are misunderstood or perceived as lacking in functionality.  These workarounds are, in most cases ineffective to some degree, leading to additional costs, and, in the worst cases, creating a risk to asset performance or customer service.

Losing the Faith

In a recent Field Service News research report, it was suggested that 56% of companies interviewed were using a dynamic scheduling tool, but of those companies a shocking 43% had experienced two field workers turning up to do the same job.  This is more common place than you might think.  Technology is great when it works, but if staff lose faith in the system and revert to manual or paper scheduling then your productivity, cost and service targets are likely to be missed.

The loss of faith extends to field-based workers who see limited value in back office functions and associated systems – leading to a strained relationship between ‘office’ and ‘field’.  In the worst cases, activities are conducted ‘off system’, leading to issues of visibility and control.

Listen to your Employees

Across all functions involved in field-based operations, employees too have to ‘work’ existing processes and systems, and may have to adopt new solutions quickly.  Maybe the old practices weren’t that good, but the new process and systems may not feel quite right either…

Whether it’s managing the old way or adapting to the new, your employees’ views are all important; it’s feedback that should be valued and utilised. Staying with the car analogy, when you take your car to the garage, even for a service, don’t you expect the mechanics to listen to your observations?

Any review of operations seeking to identify issues or areas for improvement should encompass the views of those who operate and manage processes.  The Leadent Solutions healthcheck does just that.  The key is to being able to provide a mechanism and environment for honest feedback, and then be able to sort fact from the ‘noise’ (there will inevitably be a degree of ‘noise’, largely expressed through frustration).

A structured approach to understanding the employee point of view will require:

• Boardroom sponsorship
• Appropriate corporate communications (what we are doing, and why)
• Full functional representation across the end-to-end process  (back office and field)
• Facilitated workshops
• Analytics for issues classification and prioritisation
• A review of potential remedial actions
• Employee buy-in and sign off (via representatives)
• Executive understanding and buy-in

It may be appropriate to measure employee engagement before and after the review, to confirm the integrity of the output, for example via a Change Readiness Assessment.

Moving Forward: Change Management Is Key

In part by taking on board the views of process owners, we know change is required.  In any change, process or system driven, minor change or part of a larger transformation programme, the consideration of people is all important.  Projects fail where the people element receives inappropriate attention. How many projects design new processes and systems without properly engaging the workforce?

A Gartner Survey conducted in 2013 showed where IT programmes fail, that nearly two thirds fail primarily because of shortfalls in change management.

Most typically it’s not the technology!

In setting up and running improvement projects, project sponsors, funding and other governance boards and project managers must ensure the people aspect is covered appropriately.  Typically this means a ‘change’ approach is required for stakeholder management, communications, training, roll out / implementation, and post-go-live support.  Any change in approach should ensure subject matter experts and functional representatives are involved in all project phases – including design and testing.

 

Making sure your people follow processes correctly takes time and effort, but involving them in the development and testing stages as early as possible will help them to feel part of the solution, which will result in much greater level of user adoption.  Utilising super users and process champions will also help to ensure that people feel empowered to use the systems in place and will help to enforce best practice and governance across the board after go-live.

Training is often an afterthought – if you are able to combine user acceptance testing, service rehearsals and training, it will create a much more natural progression throughout the business changes that lie ahead - focussing on roles, and their dependencies throughout the workforce management process.  Understanding how roles, responsibilities, actions and consequence are drawn together will also create a greater sense of responsibility within the change and adoption process.

All projects additionally need to consider post-go-live support and business as usual feedback mechanisms once the project team has disbanded.  If anything, issues may only surface after implementation.  This is why the particular problems of remote mobile workers providing feedback or getting issues fixed needs consideration.

Power to the People

People are your most valuable resource.   The very best way of improving your job and workforce management operations is too get them involved.  Listen to what they have to say, use their expertise as key input to making transformation changes.

To a very large extent, the way you engage and manage people has the power to make or break the success of your operations – take them with you and you’ll have the potential to create sustainable long-term value for your organisation and customers, leave them standing as the organisation ploughs on with a technology change or implementation and you could be left wondering where it all went wrong.

Next time we’ll be looking at the role of Process in assessing the health of your field-based operations……

If you think your company could benefit from the Healthcheck you can contact Emma and the team directly by clicking this link

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One of the biggest success stories to come from the London Mayor's office was the introduction of Barclay's London Cycle Hire  (locally known as Boris Bike's after London's affable Mayor Boris Johnson who introduced the scheme) an ambitious project which has brought easy access bicycle hire and the environmental and health benefits of such a scheme to the busy streets of central London.

Of course the task of managing such a project and the mobile workforce that keep it operating, is a major undertaking, one which fall to international service company Serco. In this case study we look at how the worked with Leadent Solutions to establish an automated work scheduling system to make the project work.

Background:

Barclays London Cycle Hire (LCH) – run by international service company Serco – is a public bicycle sharing scheme that was launched in London and is now in its third year. The scheme's bicycles operate throughout 17 square miles in the city across a coverage area which approximately matches Zone 1 of the London Underground.

Since its introduction, the scheme has grown in scale from 5,700 to 9,000 bikes and from 315 to 570 docking stations, with over 20 million journeys made to date.

Users can pick up and drop off bikes at any of the docking stations, therefore ensuring there is an adequate supply of not only bikes, but also empty racks for returning customers, is vital to the success of the scheme. Therefore during high load hours, the bikes are moved from the busiest stations to the emptiest by vehicle by a dedicated mobile workforce.

The Challenge:

Maintaining the network requires a dedicated team to keep the bikes and the docking stations they are hired from in good repair, and to ensure that the supply of bikes is regulated to meet customer demand and KPIs agreed with Transport for London (TfL) in a 24 x 7 x 365 period. In meeting these KPIs, LCH ensures good service for customers, making hiring, using and returning bikes as easy as possible.

In anticipation of an extension of the cycle hire scheme into East London, almost doubling the number of bikes and docking stations, LCH needed a way of helping to optimise and dispatch field operatives to make sure that the supply of bikes to the right locations was accurately managed. It also needed to achieve this with the same size dispatch team, despite the extension of the scheme meaning that the number of docking stations was to be increased to 570 and the number of bikes to 9,000.

It was the significant increase in the scale of the project that meant a new and more efficient approach was needed, but crucially, without the need for large numbers of additional field staff being added to the mobile workforce.

Previous work practices involved significant ‘phone time’ – this essentially displayed the state of the docking stations on a big screen, from which control room staff used the visual overview to raise jobs by the expedient of calling the on-street team to tell them what needed doing. Once a job had been communicated, there was no feedback, status update etc., other than the change to the main display – and changes could have just as easily been driven by a large group of tourists arriving at a docking station as by the redistribution driver.

To compound the challenge, managing the bike supply requires dispatchers to manage a constantly changing work list where jobs are frequently raised, re-prioritised, and withdrawn as customers hire and return bikes, and to be able to do this in a consistent manner. One of the KPIs which Serco must meet is to make sure that docking stations have spare spaces for bikes to be returned, but also bikes available for hire, with points accumulated as the clock ticks when stations are full or empty, and a financial penalty resulting if the agreed timeframe is exceeded.

The scheduling system must be intricate enough to account for a sudden change in the status of a docking station. For example, a full docking station will cause a job to be created to remove some of the bikes, allowing for returns. However, a group of tourists could empty rack before the operatives arrive, changing the job from removing to delivering bikes, which need to be sourced from another location. This ebb and flow of bicycle hiring demands a near real-time automated system to ensure that the system runs smoothly.

In addition, maintenance work, although more predictable, still required the implementation of automated processes to arrange collection of bikes for workshop repair.

LCH had also identified the need to capture the level of use bikes were receiving as maintenance work was carried out, and to record histories of work carried out on the bikes and the docking stations, requirements that were, at best, only partially supported by the existing solution.

The Solution:

LCH chose mobile workforce optimisation specialist Leadent Solutions to design and implement a better way of supporting these requirements. Leadent Solutions is a company which specialises in workforce optimisation, applying its expertise to clients such as Thames Water, British Gas and Vodafone to help manage their workforces more effectively and thereby provide improved customer service to customers.

Leadent in turn then utilised ClickSoftware to deliver the core schedule automation and controls together with a mobile technology application to process work.

The solution centres on an integrated data feed from each of the 14,000 docking points which updates every three minutes. This live data is fed automatically into ClickSchedule software which compares the data to defined agreed targets. When it finds a docking station that has passed its limits for hiring or returning availability, a job is created in near real-time, based on priority, skills and geography. Jobs are withdrawn if the station naturally falls back within tolerance and the system also prioritises jobs according to pre-defined rules.

The system uses a dynamic prioritisation engine, which considers a station’s grading, the time it has been in breach of availability targets and other factors, to ensure urgent work is prioritised over less critical or a routine maintenance task.

With all of these actions being automated and the on-street operatives being updated by bespoke mobile devices, there is no need for the frequent phone calls which the control centre team previously had to make to field operatives to give instructions and receive updates. This mitigates the risk of missing stations which the manual system allowed for, threatening KPI compliance.

The mobile solution also allows operatives to record task activity and report inventory consumed, thereby building a history of asset maintenance.

Leadent Solutions has been involved from the early design stages; and has been supporting LCH in rolling out the solution during 2012, ensuring the implementation runs smoothly.

Results:

Using Leadent Solutions’ rapid deployment methodology, and working collaboratively with LCH, the new solution has:

• Provided near real-time visibility of the state of the LCH network at any point in time, allowing managers to get a clear overview of what the status quo is for current work and work in progress and enabling easier management of field operatives
• Provided near real-time task creation, prioritisation and dispatch to help LCH proactively manage KPIs agreed with TfL
• Provided a clearer picture of which bikes and locations are being used the most, providing customers with the best possible service and availability.
• Provided the systems to deliver streamlined, automated business operations through automated scheduling and mobile solutions
• Provided a more efficient way to manage employee breaks and to standardise working practices through automated processes
• Demonstrated the value of automated scheduling in delivering more efficient use of resources, better management of work, and, in turn, improved responses on KPIs

In business terms, this has contributed to:

• A 40% expansion of the Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme with minimal additional control centre staff costs
• Helping Serco achieve agreed KPIs
• Near elimination of voice interchanges between field and control, saving both time and money
• Delivering a marked improvement in resource utilisation and field engineer productivity through efficient and effective scheduling, dispatch and reporting of work
• Improving the quality of operational performance data, by being able to capture real world actual performance at a higher level of detail than previously possible
• Allowing a sustained improvement in operational performance and efficiency, allowing the Scheme to grow, but managed by the same control team that had previously managed a much smaller operation.

The cycle hire operation now delivers:

• • Circa 180,000 registered members
  • 570 docking stations & 14,000 docking points
  • Circa 9000 cycles available for hire
  • Maintaining 250 bikes every day  and on street triage of 400 bikes a day
  • Up to 27 vehicles move on average 4,000 bikes per day
  • Over 23 million hires to date