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Why accurate scheduling matters for Field Service Management companies
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hen it comes to Service Management, making the best engineer scheduling decision first time, every time, can be key to both
your customer’s satisfaction and ultimately your own business competitiveness. Scheduling should be an easy task for any member of a Service Management team, but often, specialist knowledge about engineer
information across the entire company that can then be intuitively be used to advise and assist any operator to make the best scheduling decision.”
Unlocking knowledge
To this end, Exel recently developed the Eagle Field Service Scheduling Board, which helps to unlock the knowledge distributed across a
The business benefits are clear … optimisation of jobs booked on a daily basis ensures best business practice, while the configurable Rule engine and easy-to-understand information that this generates leads to more efficient operators making the best scheduling decisions.” – Rue Dilhe, Exel Computer Systems.
availability is held by individuals distributed across the team. Furthermore, when dealing with the need to allocate a high volume of service requests to large teams of engineers with differing skill levels across overlapping geographic regions, the sheer scale of information that needs to be collated and processed make manual scheduling not just time consuming but in many instances practically impossible.
Automated schedulers have sought to assist hard-pressed operators. However, Rue Dilhe, managing director of Exel Computer Systems, considers these have not always been successful. “The scheduling capabilities of most Field Service Management (FSM) systems tend to fall into 2 camps,” he explained. “They are either very complex and pass on this complexity to the user in requiring a high degree of skill to get the best from the system. Alternatively they are simple to use because they have limited functionality. What Service Management companies need is a powerful scheduling solution that has access to all the relevant decision making
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MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT October 2011
company and share it among all users. The Scheduling Board is designed to be easy to use so that even operators that do not normally have exposure to the scheduling process are automatically assisted in making the right decisions. At the heart of this is a completely configurable Rule engine that creates a score against each engineer for every day that is being recommended and
presents the best slots for the user to recommend, in a very easy-to-understand way. Some of the standard rules used include engineer skill levels, actual road distances, capacity of engineer day, length of actual travel between cases, long travel home legs, response time and customer preferred engineer.
To make the most of this information, the Eagle Scheduling Board can be configured to allow the user or manager to view the information they need there and then. The Scheduling Board can be configured to have a different view depending on the individual user and company-wide requirements. This allows for a tailored board relevant to a complete business level or to just show relevant panels and functionality dependent on the user’s role. “Any and all information is only a click away,” said Dilhe, “and when in a highly pressured scheduling environment, this can make the difference between not just a good and bad decision, but also between a good and the best decision.”
As soon as any Service Management company operates outside of its immediate locality, it has to deal with the geographic
Exel’s Eagle Field Service Scheduling Board helps to unlock the knowledge distributed across a company and share it among all users.
www.logisticsit.com
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