Typically, when you go to a dispatch center, you’ll see dispatchers following a pattern.
Every 15 to 20 minutes, they’ll open a certain zone to see what’s happening in that zone. As time goes by, they may not be able to follow this pattern very closely.
Dispatchers manage many resources in the field. And there are a lot of exceptions accumulated from events reported in the field.
So what can be done to make sure your dispatchers stay on top of exceptions?
ViryaNet introduced a concept called “Reveal” to our mobile workforce management software that captures several ideas together in the dispatch process, showing dispatchers what they’re missing by pushing a prioritized list of items to be resolved to dispatchers and presenting only the information needed to solve the problem.
The system is smart enough.
The system is smart enough to find exceptions, including:
- detecting if work items are in jeopardy or if resources are underutilized
- identifying even more complex situations, such as major delays in a certain area
The system is smart enough to do this work for the dispatchers. Through this automation, a prioritized list of exceptions – called the “To Do List” – is pushed to dispatchers, so they don’t have to look for problems.
The system provides context.
Integrated and filtered views make it easy for dispatchers to focus on the right information and provide a much better starting point for dispatchers to solve problems.
When you click an exception in ViryaNet G4, all the views of the dispatch board are filtered to correspond to that exception.
For example, when you click an emergency, the filtering logic could be “show everything in a 5-mile radius” because this is your process for this type of event or exception. Or if a technician is underutilized or other resources in an area are over-utilized, the filtering logic could be “show all the work this technician can do” or “show all the work in this area”. With visibility to this information, dispatchers can move work from one resource to another.
The system offers decision support tools.
There is a powerful search mechanism used for both finding information easily and providing the context to solve problems. You can search for specific skills, resource statuses, or characteristics of actions not yet assigned. Using more sophisticated operators, you can show everything in a specific radius around the work or a resource.
With the search capability to provide context to solve problems, once you click an item in the To Do List, you can select a pre-configured search phrase to filter the information needed to resolve the exception.
You can view a history of frequently used searches and auto-complete suggestions from the system. When you start to enter text into the search, the system knows there’s a similar match in the database to complete the complex search phrase.
We combined the map view (geospatial information) with the Gantt view (time-based information) with a list of actions not yet assigned. When you click on a resource, the resource’s location is immediately highlighted on the map. When you click on the map, the corresponding information is highlighted on the resource list or on the outstanding actions list.
Dispatchers can also respond proactively to exceptions, using a combination of real-time information monitoring and a variety of automatic, semi-automatic or manual re-planning tools. For example, finding the best match and/or optimizing the route for a specific technician.
With the introduction of our Reveal concept, ViryaNet G4 shows dispatchers what they’re missing by pushing a prioritized list of items to be resolved to dispatchers and presenting only the information needed to solve the problem. Our dispatch board combines your current plan, your outstanding actions, and the map with decision support tools to optimally manage exceptions.
All these aspects of ViryaNet G4 bring innovation to the dispatch process, so that dispatchers can stop wasting time looking for problems and can start focusing on solving problems.
eBook: Proactive Dispatch in Field Service – Exception Management for an Effective Mobile Workforce
When dispatchers don’t handle exceptions properly, all the benefits of starting with a good plan are lost.
Planning is a critical link to productivity in your business processes. Get it wrong and you lose ground to the competition. Get it right and you position yourself to optimize your response and meet budget and customer expectations.
In field service, there are 3 main activities along the planning spectrum: Strategic Planning, Tactical Planning, and Optimization.
1. Strategic Planning
Through Strategic Planning, you can answer questions, such as: How many people do I need? What should be their skill set? Where should they be located?
Using ViryaNet G4, you can forecast the workload, based on analyzing historical trends. All the information gathered in the system goes through a statistical process that considers aspects, such as seasonality, and can project a future workload.
This forecasted workload is then compared against the average profile of the workforce. With all the information that’s gathered, you’ll know, on average:
- how much your technicians are utilized
- how much they work
- how much they travel
- how much they just don't do anything
- how much overtime they work
Also, ViryaNet G4 can average how much time it takes to complete certain work types. If the forecast says you’re likely to have many more of those work types next month, you can compare this dimension to how much time it would take to complete the work. When you conduct this comparison, you can identify gaps and surpluses. It's not just gaps and surpluses for the overall organization, but gaps and surpluses in different dimensions.
For example, you can see the gaps and surpluses for specific work types and specific zones. And based on this analysis, you can decide whether:
- you need more people
- you need to change overtime policies
- you need to train your workforce on more skills to help bridge the gaps
2. Tactical Planning
Tactical Planning in ViryaNet G4 is mostly geared towards work types that are known many months in advance. For example, in utilities, this known work is mostly with preventive maintenance types of work orders.
Typically, in this case, the asset management system sends a schedule to ViryaNet G4 for preventive maintenance jobs that could be executed from now until the end of the year. So, a process must be in place to ensure that although you’re focusing on the day-to-day and the urgent cases, you would still make those commitments by the end of the year.
With Tactical Planning, when ViryaNet G4 creates the plan for the workforce each and every day, it takes into consideration and tries to find opportunities to complete those preventive maintenance jobs in the most effective way. If the system knows that a technician (who’s not 100% utilized) will be in a neighborhood where there are preventive maintenance jobs, the system would try to include these jobs in that technician’s schedule. Tactical Planning tries to think about the day-to-day and about your longer-term commitments.
3. Optimization
Optimization is also part of planning and has 3 aspects:
When to run the optimization and to what scope. Optimization is a continuous effort throughout the day, starting with a big plan for the day. You could run a full-scope optimization for the entire workforce. Or throughout the day, once events start to be gathered by the Optimizer, you can run a smaller optimization. You could have small optimization runs to resolve local problems.
Constraints on who can do what. ViryaNet G4 has a broad model for work and resources, so it knows many things about the resources, for example:
- Where are they located?
- What are their start and end locations?
- How does their calendar look?
- What are their skills?
The system also knows a lot of things about the work because of an extensive work model to define aspects in the system, such as: short-duration work, long-duration work, work for individuals, and work for crews, etc.
When it comes to long-duration work, there’s an automatic process that segments this work to each and every day without the need to define 8-hour segments. For example, the system can take a 32-hour job and segment it in the most optimal way over the next couple of days.
Also, the system can create dependencies between job elements. For example, there are many times that you can't start something before you've ended something else. Or you could have 2 things that must be done in parallel. So this extensive model in the optimization engine translates to black and white rules, for example: Who can do the work? When the work can be done?
Contradicting business objectives. ViryaNet G4 covers the full Planning Spectrum from long-term planning to day-to-day to exception management. And it supports multiple, likely conflicting, business objectives. Conflicting objectives are the inherent contradiction between customer-friendly planning goals (e.g., quality of service, the impact of a network failure, the risk of missing a commitment) and resource efficiency planning goals (e.g., minimizing travel time, load balancing the work).
Other solutions that support conflicting business objectives have a fixed configuration that translates the balance of these conflicting objectives to the internals of the optimization engine. But this fixed configuration creates problems.
First, it's a very cumbersome process to end up with a good configuration. But once you’re happy, the configuration is very sensitive to the data that you used at the time the configuration was created. So you could take the sample data, play with the internals of the optimization engine, and get to a point where you're happy with the configuration. But, from that day on, this configuration is fixed. If, on another day, the workforce is more utilized or less utilized because of the sample data that was used, the configuration of the optimization engine is no longer optimal.
ViryaNet was the first to introduce auto-tuning where the internals of the optimization engine aren’t “fixed”. Instead, we discuss with you how your service organization wants to prioritize your objectives. Then, ViryaNet G4 auto-tunes the internals of the optimization engine with each and every run, based on the data set you’re trying to optimize at that time.
ViryaNet also encourages you to conduct an Optimization Challenge. Compare our optimization engine against other optimization engines by defining the optimization problem (the in-use constraints and desired objectives) and using a broad set of data that represents variations in your operational conditions.
Then, you can test an optimizer against benchmark problems (there are 56 in all), for example, the number of customers serviced by a vehicle, percent of time-constrained customers (appointments), tightness and positioning of the time windows, and geographical distribution.
Not every service organization has this capability. But if possible, we would recommend that you conduct this comparison. Getting good results against many variations, without changing your optimizer configuration, is a challenge for a strong optimizer.
White Paper: The Balancing Act of Mobile Workforce Management
Learn how to handle the challenge of an optimal plan that best reflects your service organization's business needs.
You want your mobile workforce management solution to possess extraordinary capabilities.
But is your mobile workforce management vendor a part of your team or a supervillain?
There are 3 lessons you can learn from superheroes to break through any barriers to success.
Lesson 1 from Daredevil: Define Your Goals
As Daredevil, you don’t believe in limitations. You can sense opportunities. And you always have a plan.
First, your service organization must define its business goals, ensuring a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve when deploying a mobile workforce management solution. Sounds too simple? But many times, customers will say: We want a mobile solution. We need to plan better. We want to automate some processes.
But just saying those things doesn’t reflect the outcome. What are you expecting from a utilization perspective? What are you expecting from a customer satisfaction perspective? What would you measure to define success?
After you have a clear definition of your business goals, you’ll translate those goals to business questions and key performance indicators for measurement and analysis.
What ViryaNet brings to the team is an approach that focuses on business value. We start every interaction with the customer by discussing business goals. We also extend this approach through the implementation and our ongoing relationship with customers.
Lesson 2 from Rogue: Translate Data into Action
As Rogue, your unique power is in translation. You can see what’s true in the world and show it to others.
Second, you need to establish the infrastructure for measurement and analysis. You had this very interesting discussion to define your goals and your key performance indicators. Now you need to put an infrastructure in place to measure and analyze this information.
This infrastructure includes placing your key performance indicators in dashboards. But performance management culture isn’t just about nice dashboards. Using balanced views, you can conduct root cause analysis of any problems and drive better decisions.
What ViryaNet brings to the team is performance management. ViryaNet’s Performance Management Practice is well-integrated with our solution. We help service organizations build a performance management culture – from defining clear ownership of performance management to ensuring you’re collecting accurate data.
It may take at least 6 months to confirm that the information you collect in the field is accurate. And there are a lot of processes that must be in place to ensure the information you collect is accurate. For example, at the end of the work day, your technicians can’t just report “arrive/complete, arrive/complete, arrive/complete” for everything they did. This type of “reporting” doesn't reflect the real time stamps of what they've done throughout the day.
Performance management is also about the distribution of the data. All the stakeholders in your service organization need to be exposed to the metrics and how well the service organization is doing. It's not just reports for managers. It's distributing the information to everyone from management to the dispatch center and from supervisors in the field to individual employees. When everybody is sharing the same information, you can say you’re building a culture of performance management.
Lesson 3 from Hulk: Transform Your Service Organization
As Hulk, your physical strength is matched only by your scientific mind. With time, you’ll master your inner conflicts.
Third, you must be able to apply corrective actions. It's good that you defined your goals. And you measured how well you’re doing. But if you can’t change, then you didn't do much.
You must have the ability to change processes and policies easily in your mobile workforce management system. For example, your business processes may include:
- What do you do when there's an exception?
- Who should call the customer for a missed appointment?
- What is the approval process before work is scheduled to the field?
And if you want to become best-in-class, you have to continuously monitor and improve your processes. Ongoing improvement means you need the infrastructure to change your processes cost-effectively.
Another aspect of applying corrective actions has to do with employee performance and how people behave. A lot of what's measured in the field can help you find your best performers. And your worst performers. You also can discover who in the dispatch center is (or isn’t) making decisions that align with your service organization's goals. By gathering and using this information, you can improve your service operation.
What ViryaNet brings to the team is our focus on the user experience. Through our user interface, we try to impact human behavior.
Our field application is designed to run natively on smartphones and tablets to leverage the features of mobile devices with contextually-relevant information to ensure your field workforce remains on plan, whether on the road or at the work site.
In addition, our dispatch management changes the approach from dispatchers searching for problems to the system proactively pushing problems to dispatchers, making exceptions visible and showing your dispatchers what they’re missing.
This closed loop of defining business goals, measuring and analyzing, and applying corrective actions is ViryaNet's integrated approach and our way of making you look like a superhero.
eBook: Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management
Get the recommendations on what you need and what you should avoid in mobile workforce management.
By improving the forecasting and planning of your field service resources, you can help meet any fluctuations in need.
You must take into consideration historical information, current trends, and real-time developments.
But with so many variables, how can you forecast and plan for future service demand?
Unlike many mobile workforce management solutions, ViryaNet G4 has the tools to forecast demand. Information gathered from past activities is run through statistical models to generate 2 things:
1) Forecast of the workload. Using the base calculation to find a trend, starting with, for example, what’s happened in the last 6 months or in the last year. Then, based on that timeframe and the mathematical calculations, you can forecast the workload. You can adjust your models, for example, for seasonality or peaks that you don't think will repeat in the future. Or you may want to add knowledge to your model that has nothing to do with what’s happened in the past, but you want this knowledge to be taken into consideration.
2) Average profile of your workforce. Creating an average profile of your workforce is another important element. So you’re not just forecasting the workload, but creating an average profile that reflects how much work you can actually do.
Let's say that you have hundreds of employees. Some employees are more efficient. Some employees are less efficient. For example, on average, your technicians may take X number of vacation days; work X number of overtime hours; drive more and do less work in rural areas, but drive less and work more in urban areas.
All this information is taken into consideration when you’re generating an average profile of the workforce. With your workload forecast and average profile of your workforce, you can start to answer the question of the gaps or surpluses between these 2 elements. And with this information, you can plan for how many people you would need in the future.
The answer could reflect that you have too many people or you don't have enough people. And it’s not just the perspective of number of people. Maybe you don't need to hire 5 more people. But if it's a busy quarter, you may need to tell everyone to work 5 hours of overtime a week to help during this period.
Or you can look at different dimensions in your organization. On average, you could have enough people. But based on your calculations, you project that there’s more pressure in one division and less pressure in another division. Maybe you have the opportunity to mobilize your technicians, moving them, for example, from one geographical region to another. You need to take all these things into consideration when looking into the future.
You also need to ask yourself, "Do I have the right workforce structure to meet future needs?" Because if you don't have the right workforce structure, daily optimizations aren't going to help you much.
If you’re short by 10 people, you won’t meet your service level agreements (SLAs). If you have too many people, there's only so much you can do in terms of efficiencies. Your technicians will sit on the bench, if there's no work to give to them.
Performing these calculations is important, so you can have a good starting point for optimizing the allocation of the work.
Learn more about Strategic Planning.
In a recent study of 225 service and manufacturing organizations1, Aberdeen highlighted 3 key pressures driving organizations to focus on improving field service workforce management:
-reduced margins
-changing customer dynamics
-increasing competition in service
Service organizations have begun to re-evaluate their field service teams to ensure this function isn’t just an operation that turns wrenches, but a strategic unit that delivers results and resolution.
By focusing on your workforce, you can empower your field service team to drive service differentiation and customer value.
Using Mobile to Affect Behavior
Typically, a mobile strategy is discussed in the context of the technology that’s needed. This technology must provide the “insight that enables action” by putting all this information in context – both for the field and for the dispatch center.
Using a “what's now?” and “what's next?” approach via a sophisticated events-driven engine, the ViryaNet G4 Field Application provides contextually relevant information to align your field technicians with the current plan. Any change to your plan generates a voice notification to the field technician. Our technology makes the information meaningful to field technicians by communicating information in real-time and helping them focus on what's important.
ViryaNet G4 Dispatch collects and analyzes the information and brings it to the attention of dispatchers, revealing both the problems that need to be resolved and the context to resolve them.
Find the Right Incentives to Advocate the Right Field Service Behaviors
How can you understand what specifically drives your service team? Some people like to use "gamification" to find ways to increase productivity or to better engage employees.
But it really goes back to the data. Sharing information with employees has the potential to incent them. For example, seeing individual or team contributions and whether you’re leading or lagging can motivate employees.
Of course, there are other techniques, such as tying bonuses to performance. But it may be better for your field service team if you share and discuss certain metrics in different ways. For example, the application could show technicians that they weren't late even once this month. It’s a way to incent employees by collecting information and thinking through what’s expected of them and acknowledging their successes.
Measure, Monitor and Evaluate Field Service Employee Engagement
To ensure your field service team understands the value that they bring to customers, you need to determine what you’ll measure in terms of employee engagement.
As we mentioned, measuring that your field technicians weren’t late even once this month is part of being engaged. Measuring the number of hours worked every month is also a way to be engaged.
You may want technicians who care if the customer is there when they arrive, and don’t just move on to the next ticket. In fact, you may encourage your technicians to call customers to let them know they’ll be arriving soon. If that’s the case, you’ll want to know the number of times technicians called customers. That’s another way to measure engagement.
Employee engagement can be different things. So it’s what you define and measure as engagement that matters.
1Source: Field Service 2014: Access to the Right Information Empowers a Results-Driven Workforce. January, 2014. Aberdeen Group, Inc.
eBook: Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management
Get the recommendations on what you need and what you should avoid in mobile workforce management.
As technology and information continues to advance at a rapid pace, the need to have on-demand information has grown for the field worker.1
Improving the first-time fix rate can lead to better triage, improved scheduling, and enhanced training. Here are 3 ways to improve the first-time fix rate in field service.
1. Resources
Dispatchers want to assign the “right” technician for the job. But you can’t look at only one objective and still get the full picture. This suitability objective must be balanced with other objectives.
With our mobile workforce management solution, all objectives are categorized into 1 of 3 groups: which jobs to assign; to whom; when should the work and resources be assigned.
So you can prioritize objectives and define threshold levels for compromising a higher-priority objective in favor of a lower-priority one.
For field technicians, there’s always been a need for getting assistance, so the need for collaboration has always been there. But with much stronger communication devices, you can better facilitate the process of field technicians requesting and getting help – whether that’s someone to hold the ladder, a part in a co-worker’s van, or collaboration with a supervisor.
In a mobile workforce management solution, there’s already a lot of information about your workers. Collaboration can be improved, once this information is shared as part of social collaboration.
Social collaboration provides easy access to likely collaborators for your field technicians and the communication mechanisms for collaboration. Social collaboration is about providing the tools. But even more so, it’s about embedding those tools into your field service processes.
In addition, supervisors can see if field technicians are lagging behind and initiate a discussion to understand the problem and work together on a solution.
2. Parts
As a service organization, you can improve your daily operations by considering the availability of parts in your scheduling process and by providing parts-related information to your field technicians. You can combine this information with the power of a smart device to search for and manage parts.
It’s common for your field technicians to arrive at a work site and realize they’re missing parts to complete the work.
With the ViryaNet G4 Field Application, technicians can initiate a search for parts located in their vans or in other vans or warehouses.
Also, a parts search can be triggered by scanning the part’s barcode with a smartphone camera to read the part number. Then, the search results are presented by the distance to the relevant van or warehouse.
After locating the missing part, a technician can complete the part transfer transaction by formally requesting the part from the respective warehouse.
But many times, a technician needs a part from another technician who’s close by. The ViryaNet G4 Field Application supports a “quick transfer of parts” between 2 vans.
Using the collaboration functions – call, text, email – the technician can arrange to meet for this quick transfer of parts.
With the click of a button, the technician initiates a quick parts transaction from one van to another. But the transaction isn’t an open-ended request. The technician who’s providing the part must acknowledge this transaction.
3. Information
Technicians need the right skills and tools (i.e., parts) in order to solve problems. They also need the information to reach the correct conclusions. Past service history, work instruction changes, and new regulations are all factors that can dramatically impede or impair a field technician from being able to resolve an issue efficiently the first time.
Information is not static; it changes, improves, and degrades. Outfitting technicians with mobile devices to access data and information while on the go is a must in this current environment of change. Also, the ability for a technician to, in real-time, capture customer or equipment information and make that information available (e.g., central knowledgebase) to other functions within the organization (which may be back at the office) speeds data transfer, work closure, invoicing, and feedback.
The more accurate information the field technician has in regard to the customer, the problem, and the resources available, the easier it will be for them to find the answer and resolve the customer issue.2
1,2Source: Field Service 2014: Access to the Right Information Empowers a Results-Driven Workforce. January, 2014. Aberdeen Group, Inc.
eBook: Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management
Get the recommendations on what you need and what you should avoid in mobile workforce management.
Planning is an ongoing, continuous decision-making effort.
Different activities – requiring several technologies – need to be handled along the time axis and in different frequencies.
Planning isn’t just the daily optimization or the optimization for the next day’s schedule. Whether your service organization handles break-fixes, planned maintenance, or long-term projects, you’re managing activities across the planning spectrum.
Strategic Planning
At one end of the Planning Spectrum is Strategic Planning which is a long-term, statistical forecast of work and comparison with the workload.
Strategic Planning isn’t used to look at “real” work, but to:
- look at history and use a statistical model to predict work into the future (even many years into the future)
- compare it with the expected capacity to execute work over that period
- identify the gaps
Tactical Planning
Tactical Planning continues on from Strategic Planning and is intended to analyze how your known capacity is going to accomplish known work, for example, you have:
- an asset base and you need to create work for preventative maintenance
- a meter or copper pipe replacement program
- a particular technology that’s rolling out
Tactical Planning is used in ViryaNet G4 by running an Optimizer Plan. The built-in capability of the Optimizer decides who should do what work and when. The Adaptive Loading aspects of the Optimizer ensure that a sensible plan is created.
Without Adaptive Loading, if you have 7,000 copper replacement jobs, the system would try to schedule them all as early as possible. So you need some logic in the system to schedule everything intelligently by taking into consideration work that’s still unknown at the time of creating the plan, but could take precedence once created.
Generating a Plan
The goal of generating a plan is to have a process that’s capable of assigning large amounts of tasks to hundreds of resources for a long horizon within a short time. Such a plan, if optimally created, could give you important visibility to when you could expect your backlog of known commitments to be executed.
So, if you have a year’s worth of copper replacement jobs that you want to plan out over a year, you can still use Tactical Planning in ViryaNet G4.
Let’s say you have 10,000 jobs to accomplish over the next 30 days. You want to produce a plan that shows how you can accomplish that or where you fall short. You also want this process to run quickly. You don’t want the process to take 20 days to run. You want to run it and see the results. Maybe make a change and run it again.
ViryaNet G4 uses Adaptive Loading on each individual run to decide which jobs to include. On any one day in your planning period, Adaptive Loading makes sure that you’re only considering the work that needs to be done that day.
So, if you have 10,000 meter replacements, you don’t try to do them all at the beginning of the week, filling the days of your field technicians with these jobs. Adaptive Loading provides an algorithm that spreads the work over a certain time period, so that you’re doing things in the most efficient way possible.
The process of managing a backlog of known commitments should be integrated both with your long-term plans and with your daily scheduling optimizations for visibility and maximum efficiencies.
White Paper: Managing the Known and Unknown in Mobile Workforce Management
Get planning wrong and you lose ground. Get it right and you can optimize your service organization’s response.
Because your customers have embraced mobile devices, expectations are that your service organization will also be able to react in real-time and provide better service.
In fact, more companies will migrate to mobile earlier than they currently envision. And mobile will change how your field technicians work.
Your field application must ensure that your field workforce is following the plan and must handle changes proactively by emphasizing real-time communication between the field and the back office.
Using a “what's now?” and “what's next?” approach via a sophisticated events-driven engine, the ViryaNet G4 Field Application provides contextually relevant information to align your field technicians with the current plan.
Events could be coming from the field (e.g., a worker is stuck in traffic, getting a late start in traveling to the work site) or happening in the office (e.g., a new high-priority call that must be assigned). These events have an impact on your schedule. The ViryaNet G4 Field Application provides a real-time representation to your field technicians of what they should do “Now & Next”.
Another unique element of the “Now & Next” function is voice enablement. The field application supports voice activation, provides voice guidance to your field technicians, and automates reminders and status updates through geo-location and movement sensors. In addition, the application allows for easier communication with customers, peers and managers via phone, text or email, as well as better collaboration and information sharing, enabling improved customer satisfaction.
Any change to your plan generates a notification to the field technician via voice message. The field technician can always ask for information, but in the context of “Now & Next”, in order to maintain focus on the work. For example, the field technician says “now” to get information about the current job (and “next” to get information about the next job). When the field technician says “call customer”, a phone call is initiated to the customer for the current job.
Your field application needs to:
- support a multi-device environment without compromising the user experience
- extend its usefulness while on the road and at the work site
- improve collaboration with stakeholders, communicating and sharing information with peers, supervisors, dispatchers and customers
- streamline the user experience by automating status updates
- use the device notification patterns to focus your field technicians on the plan
The ViryaNet G4 Field Application takes the ability to react in real-time to the next level and improves your ability to focus your field technicians on “Now & Next”. And with that focus, your service organization can better enforce a plan that represents the optimal balance between customer satisfaction and efficiency.
eBook: Field Mobility: 3 Tips for Navigating the Mobile First Minefield
Which approach best suits your needs, your skills, and your users?
Every time there’s a problem to be solved, a dispatcher can’t focus on 50 technicians, 500 work orders, and the organizational structure without losing track of progress in other areas.
But with “context-aware computing” there’s been a shift in how exceptions can be managed. Moving dispatchers from reactive to proactive is a transformation for your service organization.
In order to achieve this transformation, there’s a lot of information that needs to be analyzed carefully and presented to the dispatchers in the right context.
ViryaNet’s dispatch brings more automation into the dispatcher’s task flow by merging the manual work and an automated approach and improving the user experience at every step in the task flow.
So when dispatchers click a To Do Item in the To Do List, the corresponding information – resources, actions, and the map – is filtered to automatically generate the scope for the exception.
ViryaNet’s dispatch board offers interactive views for the Gantt chart, the outstanding actions list, and the map to provide context for the plan, the exception, and any information needed to solve the problem.
In addition to bringing different views together – the Gantt chart that shows the current plan, the outstanding actions, and the map – we created a connection between the views. So if you select a resource on the Gantt chart where you see the current plan, you’ll see the resource also highlighted on the map. And it’s the same with the work that needs to be assigned. If you highlight this work, you’ll see it on the map. If you highlight the work that was scheduled, you’ll see the work on the map and the resource that was attached to that work also highlighted on the map.
Having the geographical and time perspectives together is also important. If the geographical and time views were separate, when you go to the map, it’s very hard to visualize the time perspective because you just see a bunch of work on the map. It’s also hard to visualize when work was planned and when work needs to be executed. Work is easier to view on the Gantt chart, but then you lose the geographical perspective. You don’t know where anything is happening. You have to figure it out one-by-one because it’s not visualized.
Because we brought all these things together as well as adding features to connect the views, then dispatchers can understand the connection between the views.
Through context awareness, the To Do List is “connected” to the resources, actions, and the map, filtering and presenting only the information needed in the context of the problem to be solved.
eBook: Proactive Dispatch in Field Service – Exception Management for an Effective Mobile Workforce
When dispatchers don’t handle exceptions properly, all the benefits of starting with a good plan are lost.
Improving your field service starts with defining your business goals, the related business questions that must be analyzed to reach your business goals, and the key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and track for continuous improvement.
But it’s hard to get the answers to improving your field service, if you’re not asking the right questions.
Business questions relevant to your service organization can fall under one or more categories, for example:
Customer Satisfaction
- Is our appointment booking window optimal?
- Are we on-time to appointments?
- Are we improving our time-to-service initiation and resolution?
- What percentage of jobs is completed successfully on the first call?
- Are we reducing the number of repeat visits?
- How often does lack of the appropriate part contribute to a return visit?
- Are we meeting our service level agreements (SLAs)?
Workforce Buildup
- What is the number of overtime hours estimated for in-house employees for next month’s work?
- What is the estimated cost of outsourced employees for tasks by type?
- Are there enough or too few resources available in a service team/area to fulfill upcoming jobs?
- What will happen if there are more (or less) employees to address the same work?
- How will a change to workforce buildup affect utilization?
Workforce Effectiveness
- Should we give employees “the plan” at the beginning of the day or should we give them a “partial plan” incrementally throughout the day (e.g., every few hours)?
- Can we improve on start-of-day?
- Are we following our optimized routes?
- Do our field technicians comply with the schedule (work plan)?
- Who are our best and worst performers?
- Can we reduce the number of repeat visits?
- How much of the working day is consumed with non-productive work or travel?
- Are we using overtime? If so, are we using overtime effectively?
- Are we planning well?
- Are we executing our plan appropriately?
- How can we improve our planning and scheduling to increase our efficiency?
Supply Chain Costs
- On average, what is the number of parts located in vans per region?
- How do parts levels and costs compare to consumption?
- Are we gaining better control over stock levels and usage of parts in the field?
- How often does lack of the appropriate part contribute to a return visit?
- Are we preventing parts loss?
The ViryaNet Performance Management Framework is integrated with ViryaNet G4 and includes out-of-the-box KPIs, charts, and dashboards to help you address specific business goals and business questions.
For example, the Productivity & Effectiveness package targets business goals related to meeting your SLAs and keeping appointments:
- quality of utilization and productivity
- effective use of overtime and reduction of overtime
- compliance of planned vs. actual work and travel time efficiency
The Productivity & Effectiveness package analyzes your history, including productivity, work utilization, and the behavior of your employees, so you can identify trends.
The Operational Analysis package helps you address “today’s plan” and tweak those plans, when needed. You can plan better and optimize your plan by re-prioritizing your objectives and comparing the costs and benefits of different objectives. The Operational Analysis package helps you address execution of the plan against the optimized plan. And the impact of prioritizing, for example, workload balance over travel time.
The Demand & Impact package helps your better prepare for your future workload with a visualized analysis of workload forecasting. For example, you can see a certain utilization of your employees. By applying a statistical formula with a simple what/if scenario, you can see what will happen if you have more employees to address the same work. For example, if you change your workforce buildup, how will it affect your utilization?
Developing and practicing continuous performance management helps you analyze your business questions and is crucial to monitoring progress towards your business objectives (which may change with time) and enabling continuous improvement towards achieving your goals.
In addition, providing individual performance data to your field technicians is a way to engage them toward the achievement of overall business goals. You should consider sharing performance metrics with your employees, and whether employees can (or should) view individual metrics on their mobile devices.
Based on years of experience with service organizations, ViryaNet also offers consultancy services to help you build your own tailored Performance Management Framework and to train you on how to practice performance management continuously and adjust your business goals as you achieve them.
Learn more about Performance Management.