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Your field service engineers are the most important element of your entire workforce. Your entire company's reputation in their hands. Your field service engineers are the public face of your business and in many cases, they may be the only representative of your company that the customer ever sees.

In this feature adapted from Advanced Field Service's Service Management Handbook 2014 we look at 7 wtools you should be applying to arm your field engineers to defend your reputation and deliver field service excellence

You can download a copy of the full 45 page Service Management Handbook by clicking this link

Your reputation, spread by word of mouth or increasingly through social media and online reviews, is founded on the experience your customers have of your engineers. Unfortunately, customers seem more likely to broadcast a negative experience than a positive one, especially in the consumer or domestic service sector. Some disgruntled customers have even taken to posting video blogs of their experience of poor service. A video goes viral; word spreads like wild fire; and your reputation is permanently damaged. So how can you equip your service team to build your company reputation?...  

Arming your team

 

1. Free Engineers to do what they do best -  A happy engineer more often than not results in happy customers. What motivates them best is using their time in deploying their skills rather than in endless form-filling.  Consider ways to free your service team from the routine dross that saps their time and motivation, and empower them to be more productive and efficient.

 

1. Talk to your workforce - It may seem obvious, but communication with your workforce, holding regular face-to-face group meetings on the status of the business and sharing any development plans will all help build a work team ethos, visibly improve productivity and make individuals feel valued and part of the bigger picture. Consider holding workshops between management and the workforce to maximise the knowledge of the entire company and boost morale.

 

1. Make your engineers your eyes and ears - With their close, on-the-ground contact with your customer base, even the most junior engineer can be a source of intelligence, such as feedback on how your customers regard your products and services: are they generally happy or are there murmurings about changing their supplier or service provider? Your field team is also a valuable channel for communicating your vision of service quality and also for publicising forthcoming product updates or new releases.

 

1. Encourage self monitoring - Some service companies are using modern technology such as GPS tracking to weed out the worst instances of misconduct among their engineers. Others are adopting a more complementary method where their engineers choose their priorities and self-monitor their performance, an enlightened approach that can pay dividends. Whatever you decide, consider the culture of your organisation. You may choose a halfway stance – after all, you don’t want to be seen as Big Brother, but it’s likely you’ll need some sort of process in place to support your growing business.

 

1. <Information: the vital tool in your engineers’ kit -  It’s essential that your engineers have the right tools for the job, and not only their physical toolkit, to arrive on-site fully armed and hit the ground running. They need information about the product, such as parts, diagrams, nature of the problem and known workarounds, as well as information about the customer, including their service history and essentials such as their contact details and location. In addition, alert your engineers to any issues that the customer has, such as a recurring problem with a particular product, so that they can handle the situation with all due sensitivity.

 

1. Mobilise your team - Information should also travel in the reverse direction: from the engineer back to base. Using their mobile device, engineers can send the customer’s sign-off back to the call control centre, along with any photographs or other supporting evidence, and details such as time to arrive on site and time to complete the job. This information can be sent immediately to the contract manager to provide an instant report. A mobile solution is also a useful way to record exceptions to your usual high standards. In some cases, your engineer may be prevented from getting to the root of the problem. Was the equipment inaccessible due to a physical obstruction or the machine being unavailable for servicing? A photo will provide supporting evidence should there be a query from the customer at a later date.

 

1. Room to grow - To keep staff retention to a maximum, it makes sense to build a happy and rewarding work environment where employees can flourish and grow. A clear and defined development strategy and regular career mentoring is likely to make employees more inclined to stay at a company. Mixing up experienced engineers with new engineers will also speed up the learning curve and give individuals the opportunity to advance.

 

 

Want to know more? You can download a copy of the full 45 page Service Management Handbook by clicking this link

 

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It has long been known that field service organisations can utilise technology to reduce costs, boost efficiency and improve the productivity of their mobile workforce. But knowing exactly how to make the most of the technology and opportunities out there is not so black and white. Lucien Wynn, Managing Director of Oneserve discusses...

The last couple of years have brought mobile technology on in leaps and bounds, and as such there is now a plethora of options out there for utilising mobile technologies to improve workforce management. Organisations with a mobile workforce can, for example, use software installed on mobile devices to keep their technicians updated with all the information they need while in the field. Jobs can be updated, instant feedback on the progress of jobs can be provided and the technicians’ exact location can be tracked, all in real time. But implementing the right solution can be a challenge.

The importance of keeping up with the mobile revolution has not gone unnoticed; the 2013 Workforce Management Guide produced by the Aberdeen Group showed that 57% of organisations sampled viewed investing in mobile tools as a priority. Of course, investing in new gadgets alone is not enough, so what else should be considered when thinking about a new investment in technology?

Getting the mobile workforce to buy-in

The first step in making sure you achieve what you set out to when investing in new technology is to gain buy-in from those who will be using it. Without that, it will never be utilised properly and thus wasted. According to research from the Aberdeen Group, 67% of Best-in-Class field service organisations regarded gaining buy-in from their field service technicians as the most important aspect in ensuring the timely and effective deployment of a mobile solution. If your employees are involved in the decision-making process and know what they are getting when new technology is rolled out, they’ll be ready for it and much more likely to react positively to the change.

The impact on the organisation as a whole

The second step is to take a holistic approach to new investments in technology – consider the impact on your whole organisation, not just part of it. Even if new technology is only being deployed in a certain department, at some point it is likely to have an impact elsewhere. For example, consider a new piece of accounting software being used in the finance department – you’d be forgiven for assuming that it would never affect your field service technicians. But that may well not be true – imagine if it had an impact on the way expenses had to be submitted; everyone in the company who had to make expenses claims on a regular basis, including workers in the field, would be affected.

Short-term vs long-term

Another consideration should be the long-term impact of the new technology. Could it lead to an improvement in the way your business functions for many years to come? If so, don’t let worries about its impact in the short-term prevent you from adopting the technology. Most organisations, big and small, will experience some teething problems with new technology initially, but it often just takes a little time to bed in before it yields positive results. Of course, you will need to take into account both the potential long-term and short-term impacts on your business, but if the former outweigh the latter, then by all means you should do what you can to push the adoption of the new technology.

In summary, then, if you are to effectively utilise technology to increase the efficiency of your mobile workforce you’ll need to consider various factors. Of those mentioned above, perhaps the most important is gaining buy-in to the technology from your field workers. They’ve got to want to use the technology you supply them with, and are much more likely to do so if they know how it will help them in their daily jobs (they also, of course, need to know how to use it). Without that, you could be left with both an underutilised new technology and an underproductive workforce.

Of course, it’s also very important to consider how new technology will impact on your whole business, and not just those who it affects directly. If you’re making a big investment, it is inevitable that it will have an impact on the entire business so bear this in mind. At the same time, don’t let a big change put you off – if you think the move is right, go ahead with it.

Finally, remember to take a long-term view. Sometimes the cost of making a new investment in software or technology can seem high and lead you to question whether it is worth it. But consider what benefits the investment could bring over the next 1, 3 and 5 years and then take a fresh look – you may be surprised at the long term benefits it will bring.

Road Traffic Solutions, a traffic management organisation who supported the management of the roads throughout the London Olympics and the Royal Wedding have been able to save thousands of pounds in administration costs having switched to a new paperless means of working.

The company who moved onto the MyMobileWorkers‘ system in October have already seen significant savings not only by reducing the amount of time spent on administration but also by cutting out a whopping 1.2 tonnes of paper. To put that into context as well as being great for the environment it equates to a real world saving of almost £12,000 in the five months since they adopted the workforce management app.

RTS staff carry out around 18,000 jobs a year from minor street works in city centres to motorway closures and diversions. The 50 workers now complete job information on the go, which dramatically reduced the administrative burden that RTS had whilst previously logging this information on paper.

The field staff use the MyMobileWorkers app to record information such as proving which items are with which worker at a specific time, details of where the items are being delivered to, and specifically where on the road they are due to be placed,

This has given RTS instant visibility with photographic evidence, of their workflow as opposed to having to wait until the worker has returned to the office and the job being logged as completed which was the process previously.

As well as  delivering cost savings the switch has also provided RTS with improved location and management of their own hire equipment. The result of this is that staff can now search and view instantly which items are in use on which job, allowing them to see which items are missing and at what stage of the job.

Of course as with any field service technology RTS have been able to importantly translate the benefits to their customers also who now have instant access to job details and photographic proof of job completion.

Ben Dexter, Associate Director from RTS said: “Previously we were having a complete nightmare with masses of paperwork and as a company which is growing rapidly, we were looking for a new way of working to ensure our processes were as efficient and streamlined as they could be.

“With all new technology, there can be a degree of uncertainty amongst the workforce as to how it works but MyMobileWorkers was simple to use and within a month, all of our 50 workers were up and running, and using it on their Android devices.”

Graham Whistance, founder of MyMobileWorkers, said: “As Road Traffic Solutions is one of the fastest growing companies in the traffic management sector, they needed the technology alongside this to help them grow further.

“MyMobileWorkers works particularly well in the fast paced environment of the traffic management sector where managers rely on real time updates and the need for accurate job information to be recorded. With Road Traffic Solutions for example, they need to ensure that any of their equipment such as temporary traffic signals or cones, are accounted for when being picked up after a job is finished.”

 

 

Manage the unexpected out of the mobile work day

With customer expectations at an all-time high in an increasingly competitive marketplace, the pressure for field service businesses to deliver best-in-class performance has never been higher. Providing excellent service delivery is a clear priority and for the mobile worker, their importance has shifted from one of operational necessity to strategic value.

With a number of obstacles to contend with out of the control of the technician, may it be traffic congestion or vehicle breakdown, there is never a ‘perfect’ mobile work day. But with work becoming increasingly mission-critical, companies need to ensure that their field service is not derailed by unpredictable dynamics of the working day. A technician is only as good as the tools he has to work with so the support of a solution to manage work efficiently and effectively is of the utmost importance to achieving service delivery excellence.

Trimble’s ‘Road Ahead’ report unveiled that customer satisfaction is ranked as the number one priority for field service businesses and 49 per cent of respondents agreed that the latest field-based technology would help them achieve their goals. Many operations directors see technology as an enabler with 41 per cent stating they will invest in workforce planning and investment and 44 per cent see planning and scheduling as the greatest opportunity for investment.

Investment in technology in the form of work management solutions provide far reaching benefits including:

• Increase productivity up to 30% with intelligent, in-day scheduling
• Improve dispatch efficiency by up to 60%
• Decrease drive time and mileage by up to20% per job
• Reduce overtime expenses by up to 70%

Take control of the unpredictable work day

Industries which run field service operations are often mission critical in what they do and require skilled staff to execute compliance focused work which is often variable and complex (location and task). The perfect mobile workday would start off with all employees reporting for work on time, there will be plenty of spare capacity for daily tasks, all vehicles will be operational, all recipients will be available and no drivers will come across any traffic delays or vehicle breakdowns. However this is rarely a reality and contending with these issues head on is the first step to maintaining a consistent and sustainable flow of productivity across field service operations.

The first step to managing productivity requires field service managers to get the right people with the right skills with the right assets to the right place within a set time. Performance management is vital and a modern work management solution can assist with this. It provides real-time job status of each mobile worker as well as alerts for proactively managing productivity. For example, if a job is in jeopardy of being missed due to such circumstances as a technician being caught in traffic, a vehicle breaks down or a customer emergency comes up, work management solutions automatically highlight this and can adjust schedules and reassign work to meet the new requirements.

Furthermore, managers must be able to look at the total number of jobs attended per day per technician as well as being able to view the utilisation of their technicians, ie: the amount of time spent on work as opposed to transit or idle time, to avoid falling into the trap of having more work than there are resources. Work management solutions provide the capabilities of comparing planned vs. actual work done per day/shift and communicate to mobile workers via a laptop or smart phone so they can view work details, provide current work status and receive work assignments without returning to the office.

Prioritise on-time performance and create a mission critical culture

The cost to businesses of missed or late appointments affect them more now than they used to, as customers increasingly expect more for less, happy to shop around for services and, with the growth of social media, are much more able and likely to share their experiences of poor customer service. This is largely down to global companies such as Amazon and Tesco having set new expectations for reliable, quick and cheap service delivery, such as providing one-hour delivery slots. This has lead many companies, especially those that need to carry out a more complex and skilled service, such as boiler installations or fixing electrical problems, struggling to seek new ways to keep up with demand whilst remaining profitable and competitive.

Achieving customer satisfaction in today’s marketplace is tough. On-time performance is the Holy Grail – problems must be solved the first time, and solved effectively. Research by Aberdeen group revealed 65% of incoming service requests require a field visit or a dispatch and nearly 26% of these dispatches fail to resolve the problem, requiring secondary or additional follow-up visits. AberdeenGroup also report that that 57 per cent of organisations say that their biggest customer complaint is that the technician does not resolve the issue first time. This may be due to not having the right part or tools, not having the right skills or not enough time to complete the job.[1]

Issues like this can be avoided if companies focus on ‘processing productivity’ by taking a bird’s eye view of the end-to-end process. They need to know what the problem is, who is qualified to solve it, notify them of the task, know where they are, when they will arrive and when the job is done. Taking these necessary steps to avoid a return visit, by making sure a qualified technician with the right tools and parts for the job is sent, will maintain productivity and ensure customer satisfaction. Aberdeen’s research found that Best-in-Class (the top 20%) performers had mean success ratios of 92% for meeting response or project completion deadlines, 88% for first-time fixes, and 83% for workforce utilisation.

The power of work management

Work Management solutions can greatly improve first time fix rates. Not only do they allocate the right worker, with the right skills, for the right job but back-end logistics like drive-time, route-booking, expected time of visit, and allotted time for the job are all analysed for efficiency, leaving staff with the information and time they need to do their jobs.

Furthermore, businesses can address the challenge of making better in-day decisions by utilising a work management self-learning tool. To avoid large data set-up exercises of skill sets and work areas, a self-learning tool supports the assignment of work orders to the field technicians by remembering who has the right skills and their usual work areas. The user also has the ability to enquire what has been learnt by the system and correct it.

The information managers can take from the analysed data that the solution can provide is significant. For example, they can analyse the time it takes a certain technician to do a job compared to another. If the time difference varies significantly they can determine if one is cutting corners to complete a job or if he/she has found a better way to do it more efficiently.   This analysis helps with the challenge all businesses face in how to balance service and cost.

Gamestec, the largest gaming and amusement machine operator in the UK, provides services for over 35,000 machines in 10,500 locations. With many decades’ of experience, the company prides itself on the level of service it offers its customers which include pubs, leisure venues, clubs, bars and service stations. They provide an end to end solution for the operation of the gaming system with 364 days per year customer care facility and over 1000 field based teams to ensure local experts are on hand.

Managing field workers and field service

As part of their commitment to customer care, Gamestec embarked on a project to replace their legacy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and improve customer service levels. Having evaluated many CRM options they chose to work with mplsystems to introduce a pioneering solution, utilising mplsystems’ iMobile technology that would not only provide a CRM solution but would also offer call and email handling, manage bookings and engineering visits and provide visibility of, and communications with, field workers.

The solution

Working with mplsystems, Gamestec devised a solution that was unique in that it collapses the service desk, planning and dispatch functions into a single ‘intelligent’ agent desktop, thereby enabling the contact centre to communicate directly with engineers’ smart phones. The desktop integrates Gamestec’s asset management; ordering and stock control systems and provides a mobile workforce management tool. iMobile smart phone app allows the company’s in-house contact centre to communicate directly with engineers’ PDAs, automatically allocating jobs according to the engineers’ skill, location and current workload. Should emergency appointments come up or clients change their bookings, schedules are dynamically optimised based on field engineers’ current locations and loading and real time updates sent to the appropriate engineer.

Agent Experience

The custom agent desktop is designed to provide a single view of everything that the agent needs to resolve Gamestec client requests. It provides the agent with a complete view of the client’s service history, specific assets, locations as well as managing service bookings and schedules. This integrated approach has allowed Gamestec to change the way customer service is managed; previously, all service requests were passed through a number of separate departments, opening up the opportunity for errors and delays. The new desktop solution brings these teams into a cross-functional role covering help desk, customer service and planning. Now, requests are dealt with by one person who dispatches the request immediately out to the field. This real time view, along with other process improvements, has enabled service response times to decrease by 28%, or 44 minutes over the 12 months.

Customer Experience

Providing real time customer updates: when a customer calls to check the progress of, or change to, a service request, the agent can provide an immediate update from a live map on their desktop showing in real time all engineers’ locations (via GPS), their skill sets and current loading.

End-to-end service request reporting improves customer satisfaction: management is provided with real time monitoring of service requests, escalations and SLA adherence. Using hour by hour and day by day reports, aged issues can be captured quickly, escalation effectively managed and communicated to both field staff and customers advising them of completion timescales.

Business benefits

Prior to the iMobile deployment, Gamestec had needed separate contact centre technology, CRM and handheld devices to maintain communications with engineers. These systems required multiple licenses and were expensive to maintain and support and were proving to be inflexible. By deploying the new solution to cover all 3 functional areas, Gamestec has experienced an 88% reduction in on-going IT costs and has enabled increased efficiency across the organisation in how service and field workers are deployed.

 

Software as a Service (SaaS) has been much heralded as a software delivery method that is set to revolutionise the way businesses operate. Often it is seen as being at the heart of business technology in the future.  In the field service industry SaaS is already making a sizeable impression in the dynamics of the industry itself, moving the base of power away from enterprise level organisations who traditionally held the upper hand by utilising service technologies, which due to the often prohibitive costs aligned to on-premise solutions, were out of reach for their smaller competitors.

In this feature, we explore the rise of SaaS, why it is so suited to field service, the particular benefits for smaller companies and what its impact on the Field Service industry will be.

What is Software as a Service?

As a concept SaaS can actually trace it’s origins right back to the 1960’s when IBM and other mainframe providers established a service bureau business, sometimes referred to time-sharing or utility computing.

These services, which were designed for large organisations such as banks, would often include both database storage and computing power from worldwide data centres.

As we leap forward to the 1990’s when we saw the first real commercialisation and expansion of the Internet, we see the next precursor to SaaS, which was Application Service Providers (ASP’s). With the goal of reducing costs through central administration, ASPs began providing businesses with the service of hosting and managing specialised business applications.

SaaS is essentially extended from the concept of ASPs, but importantly harnesses the power of cloud infrastructure.

Indeed a common misconception is that SaaS and the Cloud are in fact one and the same however, this is not strictly correct.

SaaS is very simply, any software application that you operate which is not located on your premises. Whereas the cloud is the virtual infrastructure that the SaaS runs within, which in turn is housed on the vendor’s own data centres, or in many cases a data centre the vendor themselves ‘rents’ from an organisation such as Amazon Web Services.

Why field service is so suited to SaaS:

Whilst early applications of SaaS were predominantly either CRM or highly specific business niche products, it was only a matter of time before we saw a number of providers offering up SaaS solutions to the field service industry.

As SaaS systems are Internet based the ability to operate and access the software from various locations is a key fundamental inclusion of the system. Similarly as web protocols are becoming standardised, with the rise in device agnostic languages such as HTML 5 for example, SaaS solutions essentially allow users to access the entire application from any device - including smart phones and tablets.

It is this flexibility and mobility that SaaS solutions offer that make them such a perfect match for the field service industries and ideal for an organisation that operates a BYOD policy for it’s mobile workforce.

As such we have seen a number of vendors establish SaaS field service solutions. Including Tesseract Software, Connect2Field, Astea, ServiceMax, IFS and Click Software who all offer a variety of SaaS solutions to help field service companies improve the efficiency of their mobile workforces.

The benefits of SaaS to SMB’s

As well as the obvious benefits of having a central software solution that is accessible across numerous remote devices, that are specifically relevant to field service companies, SaaS solutions have more generic benefits also which are particularly beneficial to Smaller and Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs)

Perhaps the most obvious of these is the cost.

Whilst in the long term (i.e. across a three to five year period) a subscription model may actually prove to be more expensive, the ability to spread the costs (usually in either annual or monthly payments) is a particularly attractive route for smaller or even medium sized companies for whom cash flow remains an important factor.

Similarly the benefit of not having to have your IT team dedicate large amounts of their potentially limited resources on implementing, monitoring and maintaining a system is also particularly important for smaller sized companies.

With SaaS the software is maintained and updated by the provider reducing the burden on a companies IT significantly.

Another often cited benefit that is of particular importance to SMB’s is the lack of fixed term contract.

Often the service is provided on a rolling monthly basis or even a freemium model (where the basic functionality is provided for free and additional services are offered at a premium), which allows greater flexibility for a company to walk away.

Not being tied to a long contract for software that they may not necessarily need in a year or so’s time when their business needs change, is another attractive benefit for SMBs that SaaS offers.

What this means to the field service industry.

It has been suggested that the access to sophisticated service management solutions that were previously out of reach to non-enterprise level organisations, which SaaS delivers is potentially going to have a major impact on the dynamics of the industry.

For the first time, many smaller companies are now able to take advantage of the benefits of such systems including improving the efficiency of their mobile workforce, gaining visibility across their entire field service operation and reducing fuel costs.

Previously the cost of both implementing and maintaining an on premise field service management solution was simply too prohibitive for most smaller organisations, giving their larger competitors a clear advantage in terms of the level of service they could deliver and therefore the level of customer satisfaction they could achieve.

However, the introduction of SaaS solutions has levelled the playing field and perhaps even shifted the balance in favour of the smaller companies.

SMBs often have smaller overheads and can therefore gain greater profit margins for similar revenue levels . A result of this has led to reducing costs often being the traditional primary sales strategy adopted by  SMBs when competing with larger companies , who are able to deliver superior service.

Today however, with companies of all sizes being able to offer similar levels of service through automating elements of their field service operation, smaller companies can take advantage of this ability to compete more fiercely on price whilst offering the same customer satisfaction levels as their bigger competitors. For perhaps the first time the power lies with smaller more agile companies.

The tables have turned slightly and it is largely down to the SaaS revolution.

It’s been one of the biggest buzz words in boardrooms across the globe now for a number of years and if you look across any technology website you are sure to find an article or two shouting about it’s apparent all encompassing power, but what exactly is Big Data, is it really set to change the world, and what does it mean to the field service industry? 

Big Data 101:

Well despite what seems to be a fairly meteoric rise to prominence, Big Data can actually trace it’s origins back to the early part the millennium when Doug Laney an analyst with META group (now Gartner) defined the challenges of modern data as threefold –  the increase in Volume(the amount of data), Velocity (the speed of data in and out), and Variety (range of data types and sources).

This “3 V’s model” has now become the standard staple definition of Big Data although additional V’s such as Veracity, Validity, Volatility tend be thrown into the mix at times now also.

Volume:

But for now let’s just get to grips with the first three, starting with Volume which is perhaps the most obvious and arguably what lends the Big to Big Data.

As you may imagine Volume refers to the sheer amount of data that is now available to be processed. We are living in a digital world where almost every single action we take creates data. In fact in the last three years alone, more data has been created than in the entirety of history before that point.

Very simply put, we now have lots and lots and lots of data, and as any analyst will tell you the bigger the data set, the more robust the insights taken from it are.

Velocity:

The second of these three V’s, Velocity, is perhaps the least defined of the group.

It has been suggested that Velocity refers to the quantum leap in processing power that makes Big Data a reality. Big Data is in the main about real-time analysis and instant insight. Even the largest and most complex databases are now often processed in a matter of hours whereas it would have been days or even weeks not too long ago.

Another interpretation is the speed at which data is being received. One example is some smart meters are designed to report energy consumption data every 15 minutes; another could be the constant stream of social media commentary that a company may receive.

Both representative a rapid and ongoing growth of a particular data set.

In actuality Velocity is perhaps best understood as a combination of both of these interpretations. Crucially though, it is the real-time ability to interpret data and draw meaningful information on-the-fly, that separates Big Data from its older and less glamorous cousin Business Analytics.

Variety:

And finally we have Variety.

When discussing Velocity just now we highlighted two very different types of data sets.

Firstly energy consumption, which usually would be translated into very simple numerical data, and secondly, customer sentiment data which has been collected via social media. In very simplistic terms this is exactly what Variety is all about.

Lets explore the smart meter example first.  Any one utilities provider could be and likely is drawing data from a number  of different types of meter, each with varying configurations, and varying data sets so even this structured data comes in various formats.

Next we look at the more complicated ‘unstructured’ data example of social media data. Whilst more complex to interpret, there is perhaps even more value locked away in these types of data sets. However, technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) allow for the interpretation and exploitation of such data.

It is the combination of all these varieties of data from both the unstructured and structured realms, and then the ability to bring these together to uncover hidden insight and understanding, is perhaps the most important strength of Big Data.

Big Data and the Field Service industry…

When we look at the digitization within business today, we must consider that every single interaction a company has with their customers adds to a potential data set somewhere along the way.

Service focused companies by definition have the customer at the centre of their business and therefore have more customer touch points than any other type of company.

For Service organizations the potential for data collection is vast, from various data sets and the flow of data is rapid and constant. In fact Field Service is an industry perfectly placed to reap the benefits Big Data.

The benefits of Big Data in Field Service?

There are a number of applications of Big Data that would benefit the field service industry.

The most obvious is the further enhancement of traditional analytics, for example the ability to both access and analyse GPS vehicle data to see how certain field teams or even specific field engineers are performing and being able to constantly monitor and improve service performance (in turn giving you a significant competitive edge by ensuring that the service you give your customers remains best in class.)

In fact we are already seeing the first ‘Big Data’ based applications being introduced with both MPL Systems and Trimble Field Service Management incorporating elements of these technologies into their latest solutions.

Perhaps an even greater, if somewhat harder to achieve aim however, is to establish the fabled 360 customer view.

By bringing together the various different datasets, you have from your numerous customer touch points (e.g. numerical data, contact centre calls, social media data, GPS data, data entered at engineer visits etc etc) and then managing, amalgamating and interpreting this data you can achieve a complete and holistic understanding of your customer, their needs and the best way to service them.

Undertaking a Big Data project is neither an easy or particularly cheap process, yet it does yield the power to revolutionize the way your business operates, including your ability to fully understand your customer and tailoring the service you deliver to meet those needs both a the macro and micro level.

With such great rewards and clear competitive advantage to be gained it is surely just a matter of time before we start seeing the real-world impact of Big Data within the field service industry.

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

Biotage offers solutions, knowledge and experience in the areas of analytical chemistry, medicinal chemistry, peptide synthesis, separation and purification. In this video we here from Chris Lacey, Field Service Manager, about how he worked with Service Max to improve the efficiency of the Biotage mobile workforce.