What’s that Burning Smell?

Neil Lilley, Director of Marketing, Telcordia

What’s burning?  Fuel?  Daylight?  Bridges?  For a Communications Service Provider (CSP) operating a large field workforce, the answer might be all three.

For the typical CSP, the field workforce represents the largest group of employees, the largest operational expense, and one of the main interfaces to the customer.  Even modest improvements in the efficiency of this workforce can yield big returns.  However, in the era of convergence and competition, achieving high efficiency and improving the customer experience requires more nimble management of field technicians, their dispatchers, and their vehicles.

The Shortest Distance Between Four (or Five) Points

Fuel costs are skyrocketing to as much as two or three times the levels of just a few years ago.  Every mile not driven produces significant vehicle expense savings, and potentially helps the technician work in one more appointment for the day.

What’s needed is a dispatch system that can provide street-level routing, so the most direct route is provided to the technician.  But, it’s not just the route between point A and point B.  Rather, it’s important to plan the whole day’s schedule so that traveling to several appointments doesn’t leave the technician doubling back and crossing their tracks.  And, it’s not about just one technician.  The optimal routes will reduce the total miles driven by the fleet, even if a few technicians drive farther to get all the work done.

What Have You Scheduled For Me Lately?

Many dispatch systems can plan a schedule of assignments and routes that look reasonable over morning coffee.  Unfortunately, most schedules start to unravel the minute the trucks roll.  High priority jobs will arise that must be inserted into the schedule immediately. Some jobs will take longer than predicted. Some jobs will be much shorter than planned due to absent customers.  All of these factors affect technician productivity as well as the experience of the next customer down the list.

What’s needed is a dispatch system that can dynamically reload technician schedules based on changing conditions and priorities.  Flexible business rules not only assign the right technician to the right job based on skills, materials and workload, but they automatically reassign the next job when demands change.  Such a system handles most dispatch situations automatically, reducing the demands on the dispatcher.  As a result, dispatchers become exception handlers, greatly increasing the number of field technicians that each can supervise.

We’ll Be There Between 9 am and Thursday

The old paradigm of 4-hour appointment windows and missed appointments just doesn’t work anymore.  The modern two-income or single-parent family cannot afford to have someone wait around at home for a technician when they should be at work.  And, in the era of true competition for voice and video, they don’t have to anymore.  Disappointing a customer burns a bridge that can be hard to rebuild.

What’s needed is a dispatch system that works seamlessly with CRM for negotiating service appointments with a narrow arrival window.  But, even more than that, the dispatch system must be able to balance work loads during the day to ensure that the appointment can be met, if not by the original technician, then by another suitable one.  And, the system must provide automatic, prompt updates to the customer (or dispatcher) if a schedule change is unavoidable.

With the right dispatch system, that burning smell will simply be the soothing scent of a log on the fire at the end of a good day’s work; a day with all jobs complete, no appointments missed, and a gallon or two of gas still left in the tank.

For more information, please contact Neil Lilley, Director of Marketing, Telcordia, at nlilley@telcordia.com or visit our website to watch a video and download white papers.