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Specialist building services maintenance group Statutory Support Services (UK) (SSS) has selected mplsystems’ cloud based end-to-end service management solution as part of an overhaul of their current system. Their existing solution, the previous generation of the Maximo system was replaced after the group found it to be overly complex for their needs.

The system that replaces it, mplsystems’ iMobile offers both dynamic drag-and-drop and automated scheduling of SSS’s field engineers, while a comprehensive service desk portal and integrated mobile apps for their field personnel should see significant improvements in both productivity and efficiency. As the system provides a true, real-time view of all current maintenance activities across the group, the results should also be tangible from day one.

Within their sector, SSS work with a number of leading organisations including Hill Woodhouse, Lambert and Smith Hampton.

Adam Clarke, Managing Director at SSS commented

“We previously worked with a legacy Maximo scheduling system that proved both over-complex and inflexible, so we were keen to move towards a more comprehensive, end-to-end service management solution that would allow us to deliver more dynamic and efficient scheduling, especially for reactive job requests”

“We looked at a number of alternatives, but only mplsystems - with its cloud-based iMobile solution - could give us the end-to-end solution and the visibility we needed across our entire maintenance services operation.”

Clarke further expanded on this by adding:

“Now with our new mplsystems solution in place we’re able to manage our entire field service operation using a dedicated service desk portal, giving us real-time visibility of all our activities and providing much greater integration of our employees in the field,”

“We have also been able to incorporate additional functionality that, for example, allows our field engineers to quote immediately for any further work that customers might need – improving our responsiveness and unlocking potential new business opportunities.” He concluded.

A clear advantage of establishing a single view of all field activities is that it will enable SSS to make healthy savings by optimising schedules for both planned preventive maintenance and also reactive service requests. Thanks to increased SLA adherence, the ability to respond effectively to reactive jobs and dynamic schedule optimisation, SSS expects its new mplsystems field service management solution to pay for itself within just six months.

Where mplsystems’ new end-to-end solution contrasts with traditional service scheduling tools is that some solutions are often deemed to be perhaps to complex with multiple menus, options, parameters and screens, for the needs of the dispatchers of field service managers implementing and using them on a daily basis.

The mplsystems solution therefore has a more simplified, and modern look and feel. It features three core drag-and-drop presentation options that enable schedule optimisation: a dynamic map view that streamlines the scheduling and allocation of tasks, a field service engineer’s calendar view showing all jobs and locations, and a complete list of jobs that can be filtered using a range of parameters.

These three views can be toggled separately or displayed concurrently on a single screen. When the service desk receives a call, helpdesk staff simply drag and drop the task onto the appropriate field engineer’s schedule. This action updates diaries and transfers all relevant task information to the engineer’s mobile Android, iOS or Windows Mobile device.

Paul White, Field Service News columnist and CEO of mplsystems’ commented

“We’re delighted that Statutory Support Services has chosen our cloud-based iMobile solution as a platform for their truly integrated service management solution,”

“Combining our portal, cloud IT platform, automated and dynamic drag-and-drop scheduling and comprehensive mobile field service integration, our end-to-end solution is set to unlock the significant efficiency and productivity savings that come from a truly joined-up approach to field service management.”

With iMobile, mplsystems has brought a powerful suite of cloud-based end-to-end field service management solutions to the market with a wide and impressive range of functionality companies like SSS need to support their range of operations. Key functionality includes a unified service desk portal; the automatic and dynamic planning and scheduling of service activities within defined SLA adherence guidelines; supporting mobile personnel through dedicated apps for in-field data collection and route optimisation; as well as comprehensive analytics and SLA reporting.

Find out more about mplsystems and there end-to-end solution including optimised scheduling. Find case studies, videos and other resources in our online directory by clicking here

 

 

ServicePower have shown a further investment in their product platform, as a result of continued growth in the European market, by implementing extensions to its German and the Czech solutions as well as the US Territory of Puerto Rico, supporting recent customer wins in these regions and expansion with existing customers.

ServiceScheduling, which uses a proprietary artificial intelligence-based algorithm to route and optimise employed or dedicated field resources, previously supported travel calculation in North America, including the US and Canada, and in Europe, including Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Norway, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.  Now it has been further upgraded to support travel logic in Germany, including the new pre calculated, in memory travel data to support real time field service environments.

Also the system has been improved and now includes support for complete application translation to the German language, ensuring a fully localised user experience. This latest release will also support multiple languages within the same deployment, including on premise or hosted instances, a key requirement for the Company’s multinational client base.

ServiceMobility has been enhanced to support complete localisation, including language, and other critical data such as dates, times and user location information, for the Czech Republic. This extension, as well as several additional planned geographical deployment expansions, enhances ServicePower’s ability to support its international clients, as well as improve its penetration outside the North American and UK markets.  Mobility will also be extended to field based teams in Puerto Rico.

Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower, commented, "ServicePower continues to invest in our platform, driving innovation and improved market penetration for our shareholders.

“ServiceScheduling, our flagship optimised routing product, continues to outperform competitive products, with proven superiority in real time optimisation, part scheduling, in memory travel calculation and M2M data utilisation, as well as growing multinational support. ServiceMobility is enjoying similar success, providing new features and support of diverse device deployments within employed or third party field service networks. Our investment decisions continue to position ServicePower well for future market growth.”

ALS Environmental has selected Paragon routing and scheduling software to plan collections and deliveries of water, earth and air samples for testing at its specialist laboratories. The analytical services company has installed Paragon's Multi Depot software at its Coventry headquarters for optimising the transport of hundreds of samples a week using its fleet of 3.5 tonne temperature controlled vehicles.

Paragon's routing and scheduling software enables ALS Environmental to plan the routes for all its vehicles and drivers centrally across all the company's depots as a single planning task. The software adjusts depot boundaries dynamically to ensure calls are routed from the most suitable depot according to fleet availability and the geographic spread of orders on the day.

"Paragon enables me to plan all our collections and deliveries across the UK quickly and efficiently so it is a critical part of our operation. Without the software it would take hours to plan the routes and we wouldn't be able to provide the high level of service we offer our customers. We import all the jobs directly into Paragon and then the routes and schedules are generated automatically. We print the routes for our drivers directly from the system, so there is no further data entry to do," says Shaun Millington, Transport Controller, ALS Environmental.

ALS Environmental is part of the ALS group - one of the world's largest and most diversified analytical testing service providers operating across 55 countries. The company is one of the UK's leading providers in its field that offers an extensive range of accredited analytical services for water, land and waste monitoring. The company provides its customers with accurate, legally defensible, analytical data.

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.