Partner Article

Breaking down the barriers to achieve the perfect field service operation

By John Cameron, general manager, Trimble Field Service Management

As the summer holidays get underway, traffic on the roads is expected to be worse than ever with delays longer than that of rush hour and the average trip time set to increase by 50 per cent[1]. For holidaymakers, this is a temporary setback to their summer plans but for at-work drivers that rely on their vehicles to meet customer service appointments, this season’s grid-locked cities and busy motorways could have a detrimental effect on a company’s bottom line and, ultimately, its reputation.

However, the summer holiday traffic is just one of many unexpected challenges that can threaten to de-rail a field service operation. Workforce management, alongside achieving customer service excellence, are two of the biggest hurdles facing field service businesses today[2] and with much field-based work becoming increasingly complex and critical in terms of timing, skills and consequence, it is more important than ever that any unpredictable dynamics of the working day, may it be delays caused by traffic jams, vehicle breakdowns, absenteeism, customer appointments overrunning, workers diverging from pre-planned routes, getting lost and missing appointments, are dealt with effectively.

Because field service managers are faced with a multitude of these complex issues each day which require fast action, unfortunately many fail in their decision making due to a lack of real-time visibility into what is actually happening in the field, directly impacting the performance level of their workforce. Indeed, performance management and visibility were cited as being key areas of concern for field service organisations in Trimble’s latest publication, ‘Transforming Service Delivery: An Insight Report’.

Manage the unexpected out of the working day

The emergence of work management technology has come to the fore as a solution able to manage the unexpected out of a mobile work day and transform the way in which work is performed, through intelligent scheduling tools and advanced performance analytics. Such technology provides the answers to many of the questions field service managers ask themselves on a daily basis, such as:

• What do I do if I get an urgent in-day job and have to completely reallocate tasks?
• How do I ensure that all my commitments or SLAs are met?
• How can I find out if any of my day’s tasks are in danger of being missed?
• How can I make sure I am assigning the tasks to the best person for the job?
• How do I reassign tasks if a worker becomes unavailable?
• How do I know where all my workers are at any one time?
• How can I schedule individual jobs based on different priorities?

Ultimately, a key objective for field service manager’s is to get the right people with the right skills with the right assets to the right place within a set time and a work management solution can assist with this. It provides a 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.

The most common customer complaint is when a 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] With customer satisfaction being a key driver to success, field service organisations cannot afford to be slack with their service and as a result, more and more organisations are beginning to realise the value of intelligent scheduling – incorporating technician knowledge, parts availability and capacity into their scheduling processes to ensure that the technician arriving on site is actually the person who can resolve the customer’s issue first time. Furthermore, developments in intelligent advisor tools offer the added value of evaluating and displaying the impact of assigning a job to a particular field worker in terms of overtime, tasks affected and travel time.

The importance of data analysis

In order to improve operational decision-making, field service managers must begin to utilise instant and accurate information about key trends occurring in the field. Real-time data about why a service window wasn’t met, how many planned jobs were left incomplete, duration of tasks and which technicians are performing well, must be known to drive service performance levels and transform the way work is planned, allocated, managed, reported and evaluated.

Advancements in performance management analytics (PMA) technology can help with this. By providing greater visibility and enhanced analytics capabilities, the technology helps field service managers monitor the productivity of their operations while at the same time analysing key trends in order to optimise the way they operate.

Based on actual location data, PMA can generate and customise digestible reports that showcase the key measures including quality of service, statistics for individual workers, actual tasks completed against the total time of the working day, actual against estimated task duration, total tasks completed, total fuel usage and distance travelled. By adopting this technology, the field service manager is able to quickly identify what is preventing their workforce from completing more jobs. Managers can look at regions, teams and even individual workers by job type and performance to gain insight into how to improve the utilisation and productivity of their staff.

[1] Inrix, 2014

[2] Trimble, Transforming Service Delivery: An Insight Report, 2014

[1] Aberdeen Field Service Workforce Management Report, 2013

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by John Cameron .