Driving Productivity in Field Service€¦ · Group’s State of Service Management 2015 report,...

Driving Productivityin Field Service

Six Steps to Achieving Excellence

20% 70%Is the productivity improvement gained by Vodafone Ghana.

Is the average productivity improvement gained by our clients through the implementation of field workforce management software.

In some cases these figures are significantly higher. This is consistently achieved by leveraging the power of an integrated dynamic scheduling and mobile working solution that reduces travel and idle time, streamlines processes and ultimately increases the number of jobs/deliveries/visits completed per day per field worker.

We enable our clients to not only aspire to best practice but to effortlessly make best practice the way that they work, every day.

It is not only the initial step-up in productivity that our clients benefit from. According to the Aberdeen Group’s State of Service Management 2015 report, best in class field service organisations achieve on average a 14.4% year on year improvement in workforce productivity compared to a 4.1% industry average.

Organisations that implement Kirona’s field workforce management software see, on average, a 20% improvement in productivity.

01Kirona Driving Productivity in Field Service

05

03

01

Handling The

Emerging Day

Addressing

No Access

Rostering Vs

Scheduling

06

04

02

Leveraging

Actionable Insight

Streamlining

Workflow

Minimising

Travel Time

Driving ProductivityIn Field Service

Rostering Vs Scheduling

02 Kirona Driving Productivity in Field Service


Whereas for many years field service organisations have relied on rostering to ensure shift patterns are aligned to work demand, real productivity gains only come when making the step change to scheduling.

With both scheduling and rostering the first step can be achieved. That is ensuring you have enough people, in the right location, to meet projected demand. Both solutions will allow you to drill down to specific times of the day to devise and allocate shift patterns to extend hours covered and maximise coverage during peak hours.

“Real productivity gains only come when making the step change to scheduling”

Where scheduling lets you take this to the next level is as follows:

Allocating The Right People to The Right Tasks – Scheduling enables you to take into account every factor when allocating work such as location, skill set, qualifications and accreditations, equipment and even language. This enables a fundamental shift from having someone available to do a task to having the best possible person available to do that task. This reduces time per task while at the same time increasing customer satisfaction.

Increasing Number of Tasks Per Day – The order in which work is scheduled and allocated can also have a significant impact on productivity. Scheduling workers against the shortest route between jobs can minimise travel time and maximise productivity. Avoiding conurbations at rush hour can reduce wasted time and keeping appointments can avoid wasted no-access visits.

Best-in-class service organisations achieve 81% performance in worker utilisation.

Rostering ensures that you have enough people to fulfil the demand at any point in time – Scheduling ensures those people are doing the right things at the right time.

100100 Workers carrying out 5 Jobs per Day= 1 billion possible combinations of how those jobs could be allocated.

81%

Minimising Travel Time


For field service organisations, travel time can be the greatest source of productivity leakage. Finding ways to reduce travel time is essential and, for each minute saved, this directly increases the productivity and efficiency of your field workforce.

Whereas there are many tools available to assist with route planning, we strongly recommend to our clients that journey planning needs to be comprehensive and fully integrated into the scheduling process.

Booking Appointments Based On Route – By taking into consideration travel time when booking appointments, many issues can be avoided at step one. By having an intelligent scheduling solution that not only looks for available slots, but can identify the most optimum slot, appointments can be offered to customers that have the least travel time associated with them.

Distance Vs Actual Travel Time – Many scheduling solutions use geographic plotting to calculate the proximity of jobs. This utilises in essence ‘as the crow flies’ distances between jobs, which can be significantly different to ‘as the vehicle drives’ routes. Scheduling solutions need to take into account the actual route between jobs in order to accurately calculate and minimise travel time.

Leveraging Real-Time Information – Road works, peak hour congestion and road closures can all significantly impact journey time. Having access to this intelligence whilst scheduling work can make a big difference. Avoiding conurbations at rush hour, planning routes around major road works and rerouting based on known incidents can ensure your field workforce avoids unproductive time sat in traffic jams or following diversions.


Jobs Per Day Rose from 11 to 15For a Local Authority which implemented integrated Dynamic Resource Scheduling & Mobile Working.

Reducing the travel time of field workers by just 10% per day can, on average, increase productivity by as much as one additional average job per day.

11>15

Addressing No Access


The best made plans can quickly become inefficient if field workers travel to a customer location only to find that they are unable to gain access, cannot make a delivery or the customer is unavailable for their appointment.

A key factor in driving productivity improvements is to reduce the number of instances of no access or missed appointments. We find this is best achieved through customer driven appointments and seamlessly integrating your scheduling with customer communication.

Appointing Work – This not only improves customer satisfaction, but also enables clarity of when your field worker will be with the customer - reducing the probability of no access. Ensuring that you set appointments in an optimum way enables you to gain the best of both worlds: more efficient use of resource and more jobs completed.

Appointment Confirmation – Having a scheduling solution that can automatically send an appointment confirmation to the customer, either through email or SMS, can significantly increase the number of appointments kept and reduce no-access rates.

Real-time Updates – Things don’t always run to plan and delays happen. By utilising dynamic scheduling with customer communication, customers can be kept informed about when to expect your field worker. If delays happen, then the customer can be notified by text about when the field worker will be en route. Such updates increase the likelihood that the customer will keep their appointment and improves the customer’s perception of your service.


68% of Field Service Managers rank Customer Satisfaction as their most important measurement.

Source: State of Service Management 2015: Connect To Your Customers. Aly Pinder, Aberdeen Group, March 2015.

An efficient schedule drives productivity improvements, but only if customers keep appointments and field workers are able to gain access.

68%


Streamlining Workflow

Although equipping field workers with mobile devices is very common, many of these deployments fail to fully integrate with back-end systems, fully eradicate paperwork or streamline processes. In a lot of instances this is due to perceived complexity of performing such integration, but in our experience such integration does not have to be complex nor costly.

The benefits of having a seamless mobile working solution far outweighs the investment required.

A Connected Workforce – When mobile working is combined with dynamic scheduling the management of field based activity is transformed. Managers gain an up to the minute view on activity and progress against schedule. If work overruns, this can be instantly taken into account by the scheduling application and the day’s schedule adjusted. In addition, field workers are able to instantly book repeat visits, order parts or schedule a follow-up from the field, streamlining processes.

Removing Paperwork – By enabling workers to electronically capture information in the field, including photos and signatures. Then enabling them to immediately post that information into back-end systems, automatically triggering the next step in the process. This not only expedites processes, but reduces mistakes and reduces the need for field workers to return to base to submit paperwork.

Empowering Field Workers – By providing them with the essential information they need to complete more tasks first time. Field workers are able to gain online access to customer history and knowledge bases to assist them to complete the task in hand. This not only reduces average time spent on site, but can also significantly increase the number of first time fixes.


Paperwork, rekeying data, manual workflows and not having access to key information are all factors that are detrimental to the productivity of your field workforce.

88%Best in class service organisations achieve an 88% performance in first time fix.

Source: Field Service 2014: Access to the right information empowers a results-driven workforce. Aly Pinder, Aberdeen Group. January 2014.

Handling The Emerging Day


Every day, field service organisations have to deal with the unexpected. Appointments cancelled, tasks that overrun, delays while travelling. This can mean that even the most optimum schedule is compromised to the detriment of productivity.

This is where field service organisations that utilise Dynamic Resource Scheduling can gain significant advantage over organisations that merely rely on daily planning, scheduling or rostering.

Real-time Visibility – To dynamically take the emerging day in your stride, it is essential that you have real-time visibility as to what is happening in the field. When field workers get delayed travelling to a location, you need to know and understand the knock-on consequences. The same is true when jobs overrun or a field worker cannot gain access. This real-time visibility enables you to constantly review the schedule and dynamically optimise throughout the day.

One Task At A Time – By seamlessly linking the mobile working application with the dynamic scheduling application, it is possible to move work allocation to a single task at a time. This enables far more flexibility than a daily job sheet. It enables you to reschedule work across your team to accommodate changes in availability or tasks required . Through the use of automation, it is possible to reschedule activity many times during the day so that exceptions are not just accommodated, but placed into the schedule in the most efficient and cost effective way.


The challenge for Field Service Organisations is how to manage the emerging day. How to deal with the unexpected without compromising productivity or letting customers down.

5-10% On Average 5-10% of Jobs are Cancelled Each Day

On Average 10-20% of Tasks run shorter or longer than Expected.

McKinsey – Improving Field Workforce Productivity

10-20%

Leveraging Actionable Insight


Having access to comprehensive insight is key to driving continuous improvement. Acting on this insight and measuring the impact enables every last percentage of productivity improvement to be gained.

We always recommend that our clients leverage the information that is available from dynamic resource scheduling and mobile working applications to drive productivity in the following ways.

People – benchmarking the productivity of individuals across their peer group and identifying trends in performance that can be addressed to ensure that every field worker is delivering to their true potential.

Tasks – benchmarking productivity by each type of work, understanding why some types of tasks take

longer than others and identifying root causes for a high percentage of overruns for particular tasks.

Capacity Vs Demand – analysing the correlation of demand to resources available and understanding how this is trending over time and how this fluctuates seasonally, across the week and even across the day. This enables better resource planning and shift optimisation.

Geographic Coverage – understanding the geographic distribution of work and mapping this onto the location of the field workforce. Understanding and exploring scenarios to geographically re-distribute field workers to remove cross territory travel.


Improve year on year productivity by analysing, learning and improving performance.

What KPI’s define success within field service

Customer Satisfaction 68%

Service Profitability 41%

First Time Fix 38%

Service Revenue 34%

SLA Compliance 29%

Field Service Managers rank their most important KPIs1


Field Service Management Software is key to driving productivity. The technology is proven, deployment does not have to be complex and there are significant gains to be made.

Conclusion

Productivity is key. It not only ensures that your field service organisation maximises profitability and delivers best value for money, it also directly impacts customer satisfaction.

We have seen time after time that by leveraging Dynamic Resource Scheduling combined with Mobile Working, organisations on average see an uplift in productivity of 20%. Yet the value does not stop there.

These organisations also see an improvement in first time fix, a reduction in no-access, reduced administration overhead and measurable improvements in customer satisfaction.

The field service activities become far more predictable and so too does performance. Every aspect of work can be measured, analysed and lessons learned to drive continuous improvements.

The figures speak for themselves, according to Aberdeen Group, a best in class field service organisation is so defined by its ability to achieve 81% or greater workforce utilisation, 88% or better first time fix and a 90% or better customer satisfaction.

81%

88% Workforce Utilisation

First Time Fix

What Defined The Best

90% Customer Satisfaction

Kirona Driving Productivity in Field Service

If you would like to learn more about Kirona’s products and services and how we can help you achieve field service management excellence please email [email protected] or call 01625585511 or visit www.kirona.com for more

information.

Contact us

General enquiries Tel: +44 (0)1625 585511 Email: [email protected]

Head Office Kirona Limited, Barrington House, Heyes Lane, Alderley Edge, Cheshire SK9 7LA

Driving Productivity in Field Service€¦ · Group’s State of Service Management 2015 report,...

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