Bill Pollock, President Strategies for GrowthSM outlines the importance of advanced route management for field service engineers and sks is this the responsibility of the engineer, the company or both?

Every day, your field technicians travel the highways and the side streets, they fight the rush-hour and lunchtime traffic, and they avoid both the posted and non-posted detours to get to their customers’ sites. They have made customer calls to offices once located in the middle of nowhere, that are now located in the middle of busy shopping districts; and they have driven miles to get to locations for which there are now easy-on/easy-off highway interchanges that put them instantly right where they want to be.

Your field techs probably already know as much about the geographic areas they cover as any taxi or Uber driver in the city. This is an extremely valuable resource that does not replace, but certainly augments, any GPS-mapping functionality that may be incorporated into your company’s field services operations. The key question is, "How can you best leverage this first-hand knowledge of the territories they support into an effective means for improving your overall ability to support the organisation’s customers?” And what new technologies, or tools, are available to augment this knowledge?

Every field technician has his or her own "tricks of the trade" for dealing with “getting from point A to point B". Sometimes, it is nothing more than knowing the right shortcuts and through routes for getting from one customer site to another; and other times it is simply a matter of knowing which restaurants along the way can provide them with a quick – but wholesome – meal when they're starting to run slightly behind.

"What is important, however, is that they [field service engineers] are able to leverage all of the resources at their disposal to empower themselves to make intelligent decision..."

Knowing their territories does not only mean knowing the highways; it also means knowing what is located alongside the highways, including everything from rest stops, office supply stores, fax and copy centers, drug stores, supermarkets, and any other types of facilities that provide the products and services they may require as they're making their daily calls.

The proliferation of cell phones and tablets has made all of our lives quite a bit easier; but especially for those of us who are regularly on the road. However, cell phones have little value if they are not used every time the situation warrants. For example, if the field tech has a service call scheduled for 2:00 pm; it’s 1:45, and they believe they’re about half-an-hour away, this would represent a perfect time to make a quick call to the customer to let them know that they’re running a bit late, and that they will be there shortly.

Whether they know the territory so well that they can judge how long it will take to get through traffic, detours, or bad weather; or whether they know which local radio stations to listen to for the most up-to-date and accurate traffic reports, is irrelevant. What is important, however, is that they are able to leverage all of the resources at their disposal to empower themselves to make intelligent decisions, and that they pass on that "intelligence" to their customers in the form of pre-arrival alerts, notifications, warnings, or other types of "heads-up" calls. But, sometimes, they may need extra help!

"It may be arguable as to whether route management is the field technician’s responsibility, the responsibility of the company in supporting them in the field, or both..."

In some cases, it may be arguable as to whether route management is the field technician’s responsibility, the responsibility of the company in supporting them in the field, or both. What is inarguable, however, is that route management is also a critical component of any service organisation’s call handling and management function – and that all parties – including the field technicians – have something to contribute directly to the process.

Your organisation probably utilises route management applications primarily for the purpose of achieving improved scheduling of service calls. However, the total package of benefits is quite wide ranging, and typically results in the following outcomes: 

• Increased number of service calls per route/per day
• Improved field technician utilisation and productivity
• Quicker and more responsive service delivery
• Increased profitability per route/per field technician
• More satisfied customers

Through the effective use of route management, the organisation can ultimately save a great deal of time and money by routing and scheduling its field technicians more efficiently. But merely analysing and assessing route management from an internal operations or IT center, in and of itself, will not totally do the job. From time to time, the field technicians may also need to be called on to contribute some of their first-hand territory information to the organisation's general model or, if they are not, they should be prepared to proactively contribute any information that they think may ultimately be of value with respect to their territory.

Most route management models are extremely sophisticated, relying on GPS mapping functionality and a variety of mathematical algorithms to select the most efficient routes between two or more points. They may also provide field techs with real-time maps and recommended travel route printouts, or they may be displayable on screens embedded either in their vehicle’s dashboard and/or their handhelds; but they may end up being totally worthless in any given situation if they do not take into account the most current and accurate traffic-related data. This is where advanced tools come into play, for, otherwise, it will rest primarily on the shoulders of the field technicians’ particular expertise in their own territories that can serve to elevate a good route management system to a great one.

In addition to travel optimisation, route management models are also relied upon to improve a service technician’s efficiency in the field by allowing them to electronically: 

• Log in service call activity reports
• Place orders for parts
• Collect an electronic signature and close out the call
• Generate customer invoices
• Print customer receipts
• Enter updated customer information

The benefits of route management are also multi-fold, typically including:

• More effective scheduling of service calls and appointments
• The elimination of manual data entry and paperwork
• Reduced data entry errors (i.e., through the use of barcode scanning, etc.)
• Improved cash flow resulting from real-time, point-of-service billing
• Shortened time windows for customers
• Reduced mileage and fuel costs
• Reduced overtime hour requirements
• Improved time efficiency in the field

An efficient route management system can make a good services organisation even better. And, the organisation’s field technicians should learn to rely on it when they can, suggest improvements to it when they are able, and use it as a tool for making both themselves and their customers happy.

Knowing their territories is important; however the ability to apply that knowledge is what will ultimately differentiate your field technicians from those who cannot. It is a safe bet that by applying this knowledge effectively, augmented by the new technologies and tools that are currently available, they can avoid many cases of unnecessarily keeping their customers “hanging”, while increasing their ability to complete their calls more productively.

Further Reading:

• Read more exclusive Field Service News from Bill Pollock @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/bill-pollock
• Read more about Managing the Mobile Workforce @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/managing-the-mobile-workforce
• Follow Bill Pollock on Twitter @ https://twitter.com/sfgonservice
• Read Bill's personal blog @ https://pollockonservice.com/
• Connect with Bill Pollock on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-pollock-b74874/

WorkWaves's Route Manager made free for six weeks in UK and Ireland.

A collaboration between Leadent Digital and WorkWave means suppliers of critical goods and services in the UK and Ireland can access the fleet-management's route-planning software free of charge.

Swift Implementation

For six weeks essential industries will be able to utilise WorkWave's Route Manager platform which can be implemented in hours, the two companies say.

Firms on the front line are having to expand swiftly to meet demand for home deliveries and other services and it is hoped use of the software can help companies optimise their resources and support new and inexperienced drivers.

Leadent Digital's CEO Alastair Clifford-Jones said seeing the growth of essential industries during the Covid-19 outbreak influenced the collaboration. "When we saw so many organisations working so hard in these unprecedented times, we needed to help and this seemed the best way of using our skills and resources to support the national effort. We have seen companies growing very rapidly to meet demand and this could really help them cope."

For more details about the offer click here.

Route-planner start-up sees strong initial investment.

OptimoRoute, the route planner tech startup founded by former Yelp and Google engineers, announced it has raised a $6.5-million Series A round, led by Prelude Ventures. Participating investors include Congruent Ventures and Michael Stoppelman, former SVP of Engineering of Yelp and investor.

OptimoRoute helps companies of all sizes manage their mobile workforces, ranging from delivery to technicians. OptimoRoute’s industry-first platform includes system planning live dispatch, an easy-to-use mobile app for drivers and real-time order tracking for end customers. Users begin to see 10-30% year-over-year growth after introducing the system, while employees get more done in a day while also empowering them to do their jobs better and faster. 

Tackling the underlying 90-year-old “traveling salesperson problem” is one of the most intensely studied problems in optimization, and breakthroughs at OptimoRoute enable it to solve problems that are considered extremely difficult even for academic research engines. OptimoRoute is the first company to offer comprehensive pickup and delivery planning, up to a month in advance.  

Offering a fast user-friendly web interface and a simple pricing model, OptimoRoute has over 800 clients, and is used by everyone from large energy companies to small businesses. While 90% of customers are in the U.S., OptimoRoute is used in over 20 countries globally. Clients include Southern Star Central Gas Pipeline with 300 maintenance technicians; Telgian, which uses OptimoRoute to efficiently plan thousands of fire-safety inspections across U.S. each month, increasing the number of inspections by 70% while keeping the number of technicians the same; and Hardies, a Texas-based grocery delivery company using OptimoRoute, which is now delivering 14% more deliveries without increasing fleet size or working hours, but decreasing mileage by 20%.

“Prelude is excited to help OptimoRoute expand its reach and further develop its offerings for a multitude of mobile workforces,” said Victoria Beasley, principal, Prelude Ventures. “We strongly believe that OptimoRoute is set to have a huge impact on the route optimization market, saving time, money and resources, while also reducing carbon footprint, for their many diverse clients.”

OptimoRoute has spent over 5 years on in-house R&D developing algorithms to help create and organize schedules, while optimizing routes. Everything from the road network and travel times, to how much room is left in the van, to hourly wages, contractor costs, working hours and skills are taken into account to produce routes and schedules that get the largest amount of work done, while keeping driving and waiting times down.

“We are thrilled to be working closely with Prelude Ventures and Congruent Ventures to help us grow and meet demand,” said Marin Šarić, co-founder and CEO of OptimoRoute. “Every business with employees in the field, whether it's drivers doing deliveries or techs doing jobs faces a complex task of deciding who gets to go where, at what time and in what order.”

Šarić added, “Small business owners end up spending a significant part of their working hours organizing and reorganizing people, sometimes many hours per day. In large companies, planning groups and departments are formed with a primary goal of creating a schedule, a process that can take weeks. With OptimoRoute, the planning processes are cut down from hours to minutes every day.”

OptimoRoute's international team of experts and engineers bring decades of experience from Google, Yelp and Facebook. They have won awards at international programming competitions, such as the International Olympiad in Informatics and the International Collegiate Programming Contest, and have published machine learning and information retrieval research in leading publications.

The system is simple and easy to use. Orders are entered or imported to OptimoRoute. Based on the entered constraints like travel durations, driver work times, delivery/service time windows, vehicle load capacity, driver skills and vehicle features the system proposes efficient routes and stop sequences. Users can manually change the routes and the platform allows for 5-week advanced weekly planning, optimal dynamic re-planning and the ability to do multi-day routing of personnel across multiple states with overnight stays. 

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.  

Tom Devroy, Product Evangelist for IFS Service Management products outlines the various options available to field service organisations looking to improve their service management delivery...

Want to know more? Tom DeVroy has written a white paper on this project which is available exclusively to fieldservicenews.com subscribers.

The good news is that if you are a field service practitioner then you may well qualify for a complimentary industry practitioner.

The even better news is we will send you a copy of this white paper when you apply as a welcome!

Click here to apply for your complimentary industry subscription to fieldservicenews.com and access the white paper now!

Note: Please do take the time to our T&Cs (available in plain English at fieldservicenews.com/subscribe) and note that this content is sponsored by IFS)

When Winston Churchill said, “He who fails to plan is planning to fail,” he wasn’t referring to field service businesses, but it still rings true. Field service organizations understand that efficient route planning is essential to being successful; smart routing is efficient and enables service technicians to become more productive by completing more jobs per day. However, they may be overlooking the added benefits of schedule optimization as an intrinsic part of the solution.

Any organization that needs to manage a mobile workforce—whether it’s for product delivery, service staff or service technicians—can benefit from planning software to simplify scheduling, manage workflows and improve the bottom line.

So what is it that businesses are trying to automate with scheduling and route planning? We ask this question frequently of field service organizations. There are a lot of products in the marketplace, and they all have a value proposition and price point, but each should also be expected to deliver a certain benefit for the cost.

The Essentials of Route Planning

Some businesses simply assign a certain number of jobs to a technician, usually based on geography, or customer visit frequency, and want software that will figure out a route for that technician to finish their assigned work.

This kind of routing software has been around for some time, and, in its simplest form, it’s something we all use frequently: it is navigation and turn-by-turn directions.

This kind of routing software has been around for some time, and, in its simplest form, it’s something we all use frequently: it is navigation and turn-by-turn directions.This basic form of simple route planning is built into almost every smart phone that has a global positioning system (GPS)-based navigation system.

More advanced navigation systems can interact with real-time traffic services to suggest the shortest journey from a time or mileage perspective. This is straightforward technology and quite inexpensive, as it’s usually included in your phone plan.

Service organizations don’t really have to invest much to receive the benefit of this type of simple route planning. However, this solution leaves a lot of decisions in the hands of the technician. This self-planning, self-scheduling method is very inefficient: who they choose to visit first and last can have a huge impact on productive time, drive time, overtime, fuel consumption, service level agreement (SLA) compliance, and customer satisfaction.

Ultimately, this solution will fail when jobs and SLAs are missed, or workloads become inefficient.

Optmizing Resources

Where field service organizations start to see a real payback is when they begin using scheduling software that includes travel calculations as part of the schedule.

The jobs assigned to the technician represent the demand, and the scheduling software manages the labor supply. The scheduling software determines the order and the resource, and considers workload balance, while the route planning software can create the best way to get from one location to the next.

This is a more intelligent, more encompassing planning method that produces a more reliable, scheduled plan. It also takes the subjectivity out of the hands of the technician and puts it back in the hands of management, but it only addresses productivity and cost saving at a cursory level.

Some planning software will take into consideration multiple variables to determine an optimized route.Some planning software will take into consideration multiple variables to determine an optimized route.

The trucking industry has used this kind of route planning software for some time. For instance, a trucker’s licensing and certifications could be considered for what type of equipment they can operate, how many hours they have driven on a given day, week, or month, and how much additional driving time they can be assigned. In this case, fuel consumption or total drive time can be factored into the optimum route as well. This can be fairly effective if the work that is planned throughout the day is static, or, in other words, is not subject to change.

Managing Complexity

In a service business, there can be a plethora of skill set considerations for each job. Perhaps a technician or subcontractor is not welcome at a particular customer site, or maybe the technician doesn’t have the right training on a given piece of equipment.

In simple terms, why send a journeyman to do the work of an apprentice? It is most advantageous for both the customer and the business to send the right resource for the job, based on all the available information at the time the job is assigned to the field, taking into consideration cost, location, capability, and customer expectations.

Many service businesses assign work based on a customer intimacy model; for instance, primary, secondary, tertiary technician (or subcontractor), but this model doesn’t always hold up. In other industries, particularly when the equipment is highly technical and often sold through distribution, the technician is the face of the company to the customer. Although this should be a consideration for who gets assigned to a job, it shouldn’t be the only one.

Dynamic Scheduling

The variability or dynamic nature of a service business manifests itself in other ways.

Besides calls sometimes taking longer than estimated, there are also unexpected traffic problems, emergency calls throughout the day, different prioritization of service work, other skills required to fix a given problem, customer commitments, unexpected fleet problems, and, finally, planned maintenance.

The variability or dynamic nature of a service business manifests itself in other ways.Whether guaranteed through a contract or mandated as an engineering change order, planned maintenance should be considered so that engineers are fully utilized. All of these variables should be balanced against optimum schedule efficiencies, like reduced total travel time, maximum productivity, minimized fuel expense, and least-cost resource assignment.

Having scheduling software that intelligently factors in the best way to assess these variables in a dynamic fashion is a differentiator to efficient service labor management.

Conclusion

The most important part of selecting a successful field service solution for your needs is to plan with your businesses goals in mind.

As you start to create a vision of where you want your service business to be, think about the long-term impact of all of the technology on your business from an operations standpoint. Lay out an implementation plan that will fold that technology into the organization as you are ready to absorb it. This paper just focused on planning and scheduling but other variables in the areas of technical support, contract administration, product management, service logistics and reverse logistics are equally important.

As it relates to moving your field people against customer demands, perhaps a simple route planning tool is where you want to start, but there may be a better way to significantly change and improve your service delivery by implementing solutions that allow you to get where you want to be. And that planning strategy is your best plan for success.

Want to know more? Tom DeVroy has written a white paper on this project which is available exclusively to fieldservicenews.com subscribers.

The good news is that if you are a field service practitioner then you may well qualify for a complimentary industry practitioner.

The even better news is we will send you a copy of this white paper when you apply as a welcome!

Click here to apply for your complimentary industry subscription to fieldservicenews.com and access the white paper now!

Note: Please do take the time to our T&Cs (available in plain English at fieldservicenews.com/subscribe) and note that this content is sponsored by IFS)

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