how to get the most out of your mobile workforce · effective mobile workforce management...

Field Service ManagementHow to get the most out of your mobile workforce

We explore what you need to ensure your field service management solution has what it takes to meet the challenges we face as an industry.

The utilities industry is undergoing a profound transformation, shaped by the challenges of climate change, population growth and affordability, changing policy and regulatory targets.

To address these challenges, innovation is required on an unprecedented scale.

Implementing innovative solutions that meet the core demands of the industry are imperative in order to; safely manage assets, maximise production and reliability; minimise outages and control operating costs, whilst managing the challenges of legacy paper-based systems, managing ageing infrastructure, and workforce turnover.

The pressures on the utilities sector mean field service management solutions are being deployed as it transitions from legacy systems to innovative technologies. Ensuring your field service management solution has what it takes to meet the challenges we face as an industry is key.

Kirona Field Service Management

05

03

01

Kirona

Actionable

Insight

Dynamic Resource

Scheduling

04

02 Mobile Workforce

Management

Getting the most out of your mobile workforce

06 Case Study

Workflow

Management

Dynamic Resource Scheduling



For many years organisations have relied on rostering to ensure shift patterns are aligned to work demand, real productivity gains only come when making the change to scheduling technology. Rostering ensures that you have enough people to fulfil the demand at any point in time, dynamic resource scheduling ensures those people are doing the right things at the right time. With both dynamic resource 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 change to dynamic resource scheduling”

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

Allocating The Right People to The Right Tasks – Dynamic resource 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.

Reducing Travel Time - For 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.

While there are many tools available to assist with route planning, it’s recommended 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.

Effective dynamic resource scheduling can ensure that the requirements of each job are met in accordance with your organisation’s SLAs.

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

Mobile Workforce Management


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

“Connected working with a single applicaton that unites the field with the office”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.

Effective mobile workforce management applications enable processes to be streamlined, empowering field workers with the means to raise work and create follow-on jobs whilst in the field, which are immediately visible to their back office team.


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

48% believe that real-time responsiveness will be the most important aspect to improve end-user experience

Source: The 2017 State of Service Management. Service Futures, Powered by iss, March 2017

48%

Actionable Insight


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

“Actionable insight by analysing every dimension of your field service”Select a field service management solution that enables you to leverage the information that is available from your 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.


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%


Workflow Management


Driving greater efficiencies through agile and intelligent workflow management not only increases the productivity of your field-based workforce, but also ensures that you deliver a highly effective service to your customer’s environment. The challenge for any field-based organisation is how to efficiently manage the flow of work between central functions and field-based operatives, how to coordinate cases that have multiple work items that span multiple teams or skills, and to ensure that every item of work is conducted in the most efficient way possible. What is required is a holistic work management solution that pulls disparate systems together, enabling you to define and continually improve best practice and to harness the full power of dynamic scheduling and mobile working.

“Effective workflow management can transform the way service organisations define, manage and execute field-based work”

Holistic Work Management – A holistic approach to work management ensures that tasks are no longer managed in isolation or silos, but all relevant information is taken into account and work is efficiently managed across the entire organisation. For effective workflow management you need to be able to define your work and your available resources, thereby ensuring that every permutation of work allocation is taken into account when scheduling tasks. This allows you to fully optimise your workforce, to reduce costs and meet your customer commitments. Work Hub enables you to see the complete picture when managing work, fully leveraging the information available in existing systems and filling any gaps that may exist with intuitive data management capabilities.

Agile & intelligent Working – Agile and intelligent working enables you to continually improve the way you work, driving efficiencies across the resources at your disposal and ensuring that you always deliver the best possible service to your customers. You need to be able to define how each work item should be managed and to continually monitor and refine this to work smarter.

By allowing you to define, monitor and manage every element of your office based workflows and field-based working, a workflow management solution should enable you to continually improve the efficiency of your operation. The intelligence gathered shows the optimum way to schedule tasks and resources, allowing workflows to be streamlined, while the ease at which workflows can be adjusted means that any inefficiencies can be quickly addressed. Leveraging a ‘blue print’ of the optimum approach enables intelligence to be applied to how tasks are sequenced and allocated to optimise the use of resources.

Automation That Smooths Processes & Drives Better Working – To achieve greater accuracy and efficiency you need to remove the need for manual intervention, reducing the risk of mistakes and ensuring that every part of your field-based service organisation runs like clockwork. Having one central point for work management removes the need to manage different parts of the process in different systems.

By gathering information from all of your systems, data and steps required to smoothly deliver field-based services, you can define the complete lifecycle of cases and intelligently turn issues into sequenced work items that can be automatically progressed through to completion.

“Driving greater efficiencies, enable continuous improvement and ensure that you deliver the best possible service to customers”

20-30%Businesses Lose 20 to 30 Percent in Revenue due to Inefficiencies.

Source: IDC


Kirona’s field service management solutions maximise the productive use of field and plant resources, providing real time visibility of field based workers, reduction in fuel costs through route optimisation and dynamic scheduling, improved contractor management, faster first-time job success, increased customer service and an empowered workforce.

Kirona’s DRS (Dynamic Resource Scheduler) is the leading dynamic scheduler for field service management, it seamlessly blends appointed, planned and responsive work across the field based workforce. DRS helps clients increase productivity by an average of 20%, ensuring that all customer commitments are met, travel time is kept to a minimum and more tasks are completed in a single day.

Kirona’s Job Manager mobile workforce application connects centralised teams with their field-based workforce in real time to enable organisations to increase productivity, improve customer service and reduce costs.

Kirona’s InfoSuite business information software provides organisations with real-time actionable insight into what is important to you. Kirona InfoSuite provides you with an holistic view of your operation, visibility of key performance indicators and the ability to quickly drill down on the underlying detail.

Kirona Work Hub enables you to see the complete picture when managing work, fully leveraging the information available in existing systems and filling any gaps that may exist with intuitive data management capabilities. Harness the full power of dynamic scheduling and mobile working to deliver responsive and effective service to customers, while ensuring the greatest value for money and continually improving best practice.

Case Study


In the gas sector, they work to expand and renew underground mains, often in busy and high-impact residential and commercial areas. They work closely with clients to manage and plan work intelligently in these areas, minimising the impact this essential work has on local communities.

Part of this includes onsite jobs that require engineers to visit residential and commercial properties to reconnect gas supplies. With contracts geographically spread, one operative could be required to carry out multiple jobs per day across a large geographical area, with significant time spent travelling between sites.

Given the scale and volume of work carried out by the team, they wanted to implement a fully integrated, flexible mobile workforce management and scheduling solution that would enable real-time visibility of their mobile workforce. They also wanted a solution that could be rolled out to other field based teams within the business.

The organisation engaged with Kirona to implement its leading field service management software suite; Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS), Job Manager, Work Hub and InfoSuite to help them achieve their business objectives.

Outcome

Since rolling out Kirona’s field service management solution, the organisation’s operatives have been able to carry out more work appointments per day by maximising schedules across the team. Travel time has been reduced and fuel costs have decreased whilst the number of jobs has increased.

The introduction of Kirona’s solution has brought their mobile workforce closer to the back office team, enabling improvements to the efficiency of their gas operation.


A leading international infrastructure group has increased productivity of their gas and water business workforce by implementing Field Service Management software. The organisation provides innovative and efficient infrastructure that underpins our daily lives, supports communities and enables economic growth.

www.kirona.com 01625 [email protected]

MobiliseConnect & Manage Your Field Workforce

with Intuitive Mobile Working

PlanUnderstand, Analyse and Plan your Resources around your Customers

ScheduleDynamically Schedule & Optimise Resources to Deliver on Promises

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

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

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