4 reasons your scheduling tune-up isn’t getting results…
Originally posted on LinkedIn by Ben Allan, October 19th, 2017
So, you’ve just spent a huge part of your OPEX on tuning your scheduling system and you haven’t got the results you expected – you are not alone. Here are 4 reasons why it might not have worked…
Everyone is working differently.
One of the most common reasons system optimisations don’t work is that everyone is working differently.
Dispatching software is only really good at doing one thing – following the workflow you originally told it to do. When it adheres to the workflow it does it well, but the second it’s forced to deviate inefficiency steps in.
With this in mind, it’s critical to keep manual overrides to the schedule low. Each over-ride is fed back into the software, which in turn leads to more badly assigned jobs. This creates further over-riding, creating a vicious cycle of badly set work until the system is “re-optimised”… Again.
Truly efficient operations thrive on staff buy-in, with everyone following the same working practices. Previous projects have shown us that it’s only when processes are reviewed and improved before-hand that a system optimisation is effective.
Your library times are out.
If library times, the time assigned to complete each job, aren’t properly aligned to a jobs’ actual duration your scheduling system will never be effective. Without knowing how long a job will take, dispatchers can’t possibly be accurate in planning their technician’s day. These errors lead to jobs being delayed and impact negatively on both customer satisfaction and operating costs.
Data from workers on the ground is the only way that library times can be realistically assigned – after all, they’re the ones completing the work. By looking at GPS data taken from technicians on the road and cross-referencing it against the type of job recorded, your dispatching function can estimate a jobs duration more accurately and set work accordingly.
When we see success it’s usually accompanied by teams’ frequently reviewing, validating and adjusting library times to match the latest version of best practice in their fieldwork.
Your boundaries make no sense.
Boundaries affect and drive the “decisions” made by your scheduling systems and so are critical. Poor boundary design can force busy technicians to be assigned even more work, while underused technicians are deprived of work that might be just across the road. The scheduling team also gets hit as they sprint around in the morning re-assigning work, or even technicians, to different teams.
Yet we often see boundaries that have been there longer than anyone can remember and for a purpose that no-one knows. Equally the logic behind new boundaries can be based on the thinking that was used when we all used paper maps.
A great example of this is creating boundaries that reflect a manager’s area. There is often no real sense to this. Team Managers can man manage their technicians irrespective of theoretical boundaries. Good start locations and a modern scheduling system can keep the technicians local, so all a boundary does is reduce the efficiency of the scheduling system at the boundary edges and impair the SLA performance – and yet we see them in place all the time.
We’ve found that efficient operations usually run large areas, minimal boundaries and a highly focussed scheduling machine.
Your objectives aren’t field-based.
Dispatching’s main objective it to make the field teams more efficient. But often, scheduling is changed based on the dispatch teams’ metrics. Surely the scheduling system should be tuned to the ultimate operational objective?
Basic performance measures like jobs per day and mileage are helpful from a people-management perspective, but in order to tune your scheduling system properly you’ll need to dig a little deeper. How well a field team is organised and how this compares to the ideal should be broken down into detailed measures that can then be used to set your scheduling system. Without them there are no real parameters to your scheduling tool.
Our experience has shown us that the key to successful scheduling deployment lies in analytics. When operations take detailed information from their field teams that’s specific to their goals, they can properly define how the system should work.
To avoid another huge scheduling optimisation expense, you need to be able to look at your field operations as a whole.
We provide a bird’s-eye view of your operation, allowing you to easily identify areas of improvement and act quickly to improve your operational efficiency.
Our work with companies such as Cadent, Virgin Media, and Yorkshire Water has helped us to identify this critical link between behaviours in the field to actions in the dispatch function.
By assigning a cost to these behaviours, we don’t just show you how inefficiencies impact on your business but on your bottom line. Issues within your dispatching system could be costing your operation.
If you’d like to learn more about what we do and how we can help, click here.
