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Scheduling your field engineers is undoubtedly one of the core key performance indicators (KPIs), central to your business profitability, and a key target on which staff are measured. In this article which is taken from the Advanced Field Service Service Management Handbook 2014 we look at some handy pointers to getting the right engineer to the right place at the right time... 

To get your free copy of the eBook "Service Management Handbook 2014" published by Advanced Field Service simply click here and complete the brief form!

Scheduling is one of the most fundamental aspects to get right for a field service organisation, but it’s a delicate balance between meeting the needs of both your staff and the business. Get it right and the chances are the business will be highly successful. Get it wrong and the consequences can be disastrous. Utilisation may be a simple percentage number but there are multiple factors that influence its outcome…

What type of call are you doing?

• Fixing a breakdown or performing a routine service?
• Do you just fix the immediate problem or go ‘above and beyond’ in addressing all potential problems to minimise the likelihood of another call-out?
• Are you paid per call, or does the customer have a warranty, service contract or rental agreement? [/unordered_list]

What is your routing allocation model?

• How can you ensure engineer days are utilised with maximum efficiency?
• Do you segregate engineers into geographic regions with boundary inefficiencies or route engineers for least travel time?[/unordered_list]

Can you categorise the calls you do to plan the day effectively?

• How do you optimise the number of calls per day you can handle?
• How do you balance the load? Divide your teams into large site service jobs, concentrate on multi-location quick fixes or mix-and-match?
• Do you bias planned maintenance work to the latter half of the week to free up capacity for the start of week breakdown rush?[/unordered_list]

What is your skills/parts allocation model?

[unordered_list style="bullet"] 

• Can you allocate jobs based on skills/knowledge?
• Do you know what skills each job requires?
• Do you have systems in place to manage this or does your call centre team have to know all about your products and your engineers’ individual capabilities?
• Can you train all your engineers to do everything, and keep them up to date, or do you have area experts but run the risk of over-utilising sought after individuals?
• How do you manage broken calls?[/unordered_list]

Do you understand the site access profile?

• Are customer premises open 24/7, 9am – 5pm, or appointment only?
• Can your software automatically match the work order to site access requirements to maximise productivity? [/unordered_list]

Right engineer. Right place. Right time.

It’s simple to manage a very small set of engineers with a small number of jobs. But as your business grows, so does the potential complexity. On the flip side, having more engineers and more options doesn’t necessarily have to mean more hassle for you. In fact, many growing UK service businesses find that big savings, both in terms of costs and time, can be made from getting the properly skilled technician to the job with the minimum of fuss. So when scheduling your field resources, how can you get it right?

1. Optimise travel times

With 50% or more of service man-hours commonly lost in travel time before an engineer gets on site, not to mention escalating fuel costs eating into your profit margins, optimising travel times has never been more important. When new calls come in, you need to know your engineers’ present and future locations. Modern GPS navigation, route planning software and mapping tools have changed the rules for engineer allocation, helping your engineers reach customers via the quickest and/or shortest route. Your scheduling system should reduce planning time by suggesting and prioritising slots in the vicinity of the engineer’s home location and/or existing call locations – as well as find the best slot for the job in line with SLA commitments.

 2. Track your field team

Can you see at a glance who you have in the area and which engineer is best placed to answer a new call or respond to an emergency? If for any reason an engineer cannot gain access to a customer’s site, is there another call locally that they can be redirected to? Knowing your engineers’ whereabouts will help you react and re-plan rapidly. You’ll also be able to monitor how long they’re spending on any particular job and check whether other work needs to be urgently re-planned. Over time, having this data will help build a record of engineers’ actual and reported locations, highlighting any anomalies that need addressing.

3. Combine breakdown service with planned maintenance

Which customers have routine service checks nearly due? Is an engineer already scheduled to attend the customer or working with another customer nearby? Being proactive in scheduling routine maintenance jobs will free your team to handle unexpected events. Your systems should give you the flexibility to generate service jobs when you want to and to prompt operators with information about these jobs at the appropriate time.

4. Increase first time fix

You should have the systems in place to quickly identify who has the skills and availability to take a call. Provide them with everything they need to know to get in quickly, do the job, close down and exit, including call history and technical information. Needless to say your engineers need ready access to spares and parts. Can you track your inventory so that parts can be sourced quickly – from another engineer in the vicinity, the depot or a supplier? Give your engineers the power to search for spares and order them via their mobile device. This can also assist in reducing the costs of carrying inventory on the van ‘just in case’.

5. Plan non-billable activities

Time has to be allowed, planned and incorporated into the overall scheduling process for non-job related activities such as holidays and training. Only then can you instantly see the potential clashes of too many staff away at one time. Will approving a particular holiday request make it impossible to deliver certain jobs on time? Or can delivery be achieved only by the over-utilisation of the engineer prior to or immediately after their holiday? Integrated planning can help manage this process across the complexity of all jobs and staff, keeping an acceptable balance on workloads and maintaining realistic timescales.

6. Review demand against resources

Workloads need to be managed to acceptable levels for both your field and back-office staff. Your scheduling systems should prove invaluable in managing the complexity of resourcing across all jobs and provide a holistic view over the resourcing commitments across the business – so you can see at a glance the forecasted demand on your staff and their availability to take on new work. By being able to visualise the impact of resourcing staff into new jobs and contracts, priority can be assessed, achievable schedules can be created and, if necessary, existing work rescheduled or reassigned to another engineer with the skills to complete the job.  

   If you found this feature helpful click here to get the full eBook which has over 45 pages full of useful information for Service Managers!      

The third and final advert for Trimble Field Service Management's latest mobile workforce platform 'Work Management' builds on the same cutesy animation but this time the lead characters are some mischievous robots responsible for managing the data being earnestly sent in from the field. lets just say that their not exactly sharing the data in the right manner... Great end to a great series and brilliant to see some humour in the industry...

The second advert for Trimble Field Service Management's latest mobile workforce platform 'Work Management' contains the same quirky humour as the first edition but this time focusses on the plight of the poor field technician who is sent to the wrong job with the wrong tools, or on his own when he clearly needs a second pair of hands. It is a genuine problem all to common in the industry and a clear barrier to improving first time fix rates. However, I must admit I laughed out loud the first time I watched this video. Just wait for the little fella to run try and fill the whole at the end...

Lincoln Property Solutions Ltd, a Properties Management Service company in Basingstoke, Hampshire, has selected Tesseract Service Centre to manage its Properties Portfolio and related maintenance and cleaning schedules.

Lincoln Property Solutions provides facilities management to improve efficiency and to ensure the buildings in their care provide the environment and services that will satisfy not only the business needs but also residential requirements of their workforce. The company relies on an experienced workforce of operatives who follow a set of schedules. These schedules used to be managed using spreadsheets, into which data would be entered manually, until Lincoln Property Solutions decided it needed something more efficient, more automated and more centralised.

Enter Tesseract, a service management software company that has already revolutionised the systems of more than 300 businesses worldwide. Lincoln Property Solutions came across Tesseract at SME14, the service management exhibition at the Facilities Show 2014 in London. Tesseract has an exhibition stand at SME every year, and this year managed to persuade Lincoln Property Solutions that utilising the facilities of Tesseract Service Centre would be hugely advantageous.

“We are looking forward to Tesseract providing us with a system to enable us to work smarter,” says Des O’Neill of Lincoln Property Solutions. “We anticipate that it will be a very successful partnership.”

Welcome to the latest edition of the Field Service News podcast. This time we are pleased to bring you an exclusive guest podcast created by Paul Adams of specialist service management software providers Solarvista.

Paul takes a look at how the Cloud, Mobile and Enterprise Systems can be brought together in a modern Service Management system and takes time to look at various aspects of each of these elements whilst avoiding jargon and taking some complex discussions and explaining them in simple easy to understand ways. An excellent overview for the those working in service management that are trying to get their head around some of the core technologies that are driving service management forward into the twenty first century.
To download the full podcast just click here and complete the brief registration form!
PLease note that this is a joint promotion between Field Service News and Solarvista Ltd. By downloading the podcast you agree to our terms and conditions laid out in the privacy policy here

Want to know more about Solarvista? Check out their page in the Field Service News Directory here

How do you optimise your service delivery and ensure an excellent service is provided to your customers? It’s a question that doesn’t have a single answer; there is no silver bullet solution. What’s more, every company is likely to take a slightly different approach and what works for one organisation may not necessarily work for another.

A key aim for every organisation, though, should be to operate as efficiently as possible. That’s why Oneserve’s latest white paper is designed to get people thinking about how they can improve the efficiency of their field operations (or mobile workforce).

Here are the four key components that we believe are essential to achieving efficient field operations:

• Cost optimisation
• Workforce performance
• Customer satisfaction
• Workflow rationalisation

Read on to find out how the components fit into an effective field service management strategy.

Cost optimisation

It’s said that cash flow is the lifeblood of every business; without positive cash flow, even profitable companies can fail. That’s why getting value for money should be, and usually is, a primary aim for businesses. For this reason, cost optimisation is of great importance.

There are a number of ways in which field service organisations can optimise costs. Three of these are:

1. Ensure effective stock control and procurement – the key to managing stock is visibility; it lessens the chance of over-ordering while allowing you to ensure you have enough stock at any one time. You can also use data collected over a period of time to analyse your requirements and forecast future requirements, potentially giving you the opportunity to negotiate better rates with suppliers.
2. ]Improve first-time fix rates – in order to achieve high first-time fix rates you need to send an engineer with the right skillset to each job. They also need the right parts and tools with them, while their proximity to the job should also be considered if you want to keep costs down. If you can get all of these things right, your first-time fix rate will improve and costs should be reduced.
3. Remote resolution and preventative initiatives – although not necessarily suitable for all types of field service businesses, remote resolution and preventative initiatives can help to reduce costs. Remote resolution could involve the use of machine-to-machine (M2M) technology, which allows assets to be monitored remotely. Preventative maintenance initiatives can help to reduce the number of emergency call-outs and allow costs to be managed more effectively.

Workforce performance

Your people are the key asset of your organisation. An engaged and motivated workforce will be capable of achievements well beyond simply boosting productivity.

They could provide recommendations for improvements to current, inefficient working practices and even come up with innovative new business ideas if given the chance. They’re also the face of your company, so it’s important they are conveying the right message about it. Happy employees are more likely to portray a positive image of your company and deliver a great service to your customers.

So, it goes without saying that it is important to try and keep your workforce motivated. This is not always easy when they are all working in different places, as the nature of field service dictates they often will be.

There are however a few things that can be done to keep staff engaged and motivated:

• Make sure each field worker can easily contact their line manager, and that line managers regularly meet with employees in person.
• Encourage internal collaboration so people feel comfortable asking colleagues for advice. This will also help them to build relationships between each other and work better together.
• Set goals for each member of staff so they have targets to aim for (as long as they are achievable; unrealistic targets could lead to employees becoming demoralised).
• Invest in improvement programmes and allow your staff to share suggestions on how processes can be improved.
• Maintain training programmes for your staff and remember to keep them updated with changes in the business so they don’t feel as if they’re working in a silo.

Customer satisfaction

In today’s competitive business world, keeping customers happy is more important than ever. As we revealed in arecent blog, a 10% increase in customer retention levels results in a 30% increase in company value. So, while it’s natural to go out and try to win new business, the needs of your existing customers should be kept front of mind at all times.

However, customers expect more from their service providers these days. They have greater choice and information is a click away. As a result, they are more impatient and expect issues to be resolved quickly. Meeting customer expectations is undoubtedly becoming more and more of a challenge.

Gone are the days when customers were willing to sit in and wait for a visit at some point during the day. They want to know exactly when an engineer will arrive and fix their issue. So, precise schedules must be built for all your field staff. And that’s just the first challenge – next you need to ensure these schedules are met. To do this, accurate initial diagnosis of the issue is required, as this allows you to estimate the time required for each job and take this into account when scheduling your field staff.

Another key expectation of customers these days is excellent communication. They expect to be able to contact companies in a number of ways – phone, email and social media to name a few. Therefore, try to make it as easy as possible for customer to contact you, and clearly highlight the ways in which they are able to.

Workflow rationalisation

In a recent report from The Service Council, 38% of organisations indicated that they could save 30 or more minutes per day, per technician with a basic change in process. For these organisations, this could lead to average annual cost savings of £525,000.

This statistic demonstrates the value that can be found in optimising your workflows. After all, they keep field service organisations ticking over, enabling staff to carry out their daily routines and meet the expectations of customers.

Any organisation that wants to become more efficient should review its workflows. They’re difficult to perfect but over time you should be able to identify ways in which they can be improved and streamlined.

To conduct an effective workflow review, you will need to collect as much data as possible from your existing processes and then analyse it to root out inefficiencies. For example, you can look at how many jobs per day are completed on average by your engineers and see if this matches with your expectations and targets. If it’s lower than expected, it would indicate a process review is required.

Analysing your data is key here. If you run into difficulties at this stage, you’ve already identified a way in which your processes can be improved. Consider firstly how data is collected – do you have a service management system in place that collects it automatically or are you relying on manual processes to do this? Secondly, do you have a system that allows you to analyse this data effectively through dashboards and reports? If not, it’s worth considering a service management solution that does have this capability.

You can find out more by downloading the Oneserve Guide to Efficiency which covers everything discussed here and much more.

Mobile workforce experts Oneserve are inviting clients and their customers to take the Efficiency Hunter Challenge.

The challenge involves completing a quiz based on Oneserve’s four components of efficiency: Cost, Workflow, Workforce and Customer Satisfaction.

After answering a set of specially designed multiple choice questions participants are revealed as one of four efficiency heroes; Cost Crunching Hero, Workflow Warrior, Team Power Trooper or Satisfaction Supremo.

The Efficiency Hunter campaign is the brainchild of Oneserve Chairman Mark Tincknell, who said:

“We wanted to do something different, an engaging campaign that would resonate with business people everywhere.  Customers are at the heart of every business, but inefficiencies can undermine the customer experience and send costs soaring.”

Beyond the light-hearted approach of the quiz, participants are encouraged to take a serious look at efficiency by downloading a free white paper. The paper goes into detail about how to achieve efficiency in their field operations and how mobile workforce management software could help.

Mark added

“Through the power of analytics Oneserve gives business leaders transparency, veracity and the ability to understand and transform the performance of their business”.

The Efficiency Hunter campaign launches on 1st October. Find out what kind of efficiency hunter you are by clicking the link: http://www.oneserve.co.uk/efficiency-hunter

As Trimble's mobile empowerment week continues they yesterday  introduced FieldMaster Technician, a downloadable mobile application that empowers mobile workers in the field with advanced collaboration tools and the ability to access and update information in real-time for improved effectiveness.

FieldMaster Technician allows service organisations to optimise workflows and improve service delivery by getting technicians to the right place at the right time with the information they need to do their job correctly the first time.

Following the announcement of Trimble® Horizon, the new cloud-based platform for Trimble's Field Service Management (FSM) solutions, FieldMaster Technician is the second in a line of new features and solutions announced this week as part of Trimble's spotlight on empowering mobile workers.

"Field service organisations are constantly looking to be more efficient," said John Cameron, general manager of Trimble's Field Service Management Division. "Mobility solutions that provide field teams information at their fingertips are vital to that pursuit. Real-time knowledge allows workers to make better, more intelligent business decisions while in the field. The result can enable increased productivity, reduced operating costs and improved customer satisfaction-three ongoing goals in field service."

FieldMaster Technician is integrated into Trimble FSM's cloud-based solutions and offers key features including:

• Allowing mobile workers to instantly locate and contact nearby co-workers for assistance
• Enabling mobile workers to find the fastest route and navigate to key locations
• Allowing mobile workers to manage their time and log activities throughout the day
• Allowing mobile workers to view historical job information
• Permitting photos and signatures to be captured on site to document work

 

"FieldMaster Technician essentially puts better control in the hands of field personnel," said Cameron. "By integrating powerful mobile apps into our solutions that already help manage workers, work and assets in the field, we can continue to enhance field service excellence for our customers."

Trimble will be hosting a Webinar with Aberdeen Group on Thursday, Oct. 30. Aly Pinder, senior research analyst of the Aberdeen Group, will discuss the key emerging technologies empowering workers out in the field, including the use of mobility. To register for the Webinar, or to sign up for a recording, click here: https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/s/registrations/new?cid=qhxelxfmvubx

 

ClickSoftware have created this great infographic looking at the uses of Gamification within businesses and how it has evolved throughout the years.

Some key points highlighted include:

• By 2015, 40% of top 1000 companies by market value will use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform business operations
• IBM, AutoDesk and SAP are some of the companies who have successfully adopted Gamification
• Gamification is a key element In consumerisation of enterprise strategy in companies such as Cisco, Pearson and Salesforce