Expert view: Nick Shipton, Kirona

Utilities can help their field forces to be more productive by using a scheduling solution that tailors the timing and allocation of resources according to the task at hand.

Improving the productivity of field-based operations is high on the agenda with many organisations, as they look to increase the effectiveness and efficiencies of their workforce alongside offering increased levels of customer service.

However, what is often overlooked in achieving this is a complementary scheduling solution to actually ensure the tasks we are asking that workforce to carry out are planned in the most efficient manner given all the customer expectations and constraints.

Organisations often offer a wide range of services to their customers, which can result in diverse requirements in terms of how those services need to be accessed by the customer and how the workforce needs to be planned, which can cause issues if your scheduler has been built to suit a particular vertical or service.

It is key to understand that the way you need to schedule work differs from service to service, and that a flexible scheduling solution is required in order for organisations to improve across the board.

Some services will require fairly simple allocation of one-off tasks based on matching skillsets to the type of work, but if you throw into the mix customers expecting appointments at the first point of contact, whether that is via a phone call or self-service, this simple offering becomes much more complex.

On top of this we may also be requiring the same workforce to be carrying out planned maintenance tasks and cyclical servicing tasks.

Other services may be carrying out far more complex activities, with dependencies and sequencing of tasks required to ensure they are carried out not only in the most efficient manner but also in the correct order.

You can, of course, look at implementing different solutions for these different scenarios, however you lose the ability to get a complete view of the workforce and the ability to see where there may be particular issues that need addressing, whether this be with a particular skillset or type of work or whether different regions are performing better or worse than others.

Analysis can also be done to see if the location and levels of field-based staff are correct and whether with a slight adjustment to these levels and locations performance can be improved.

The ability to implement a truly flexible scheduling solution such as Kirona’s DRS (Dynamic Resource Scheduler) not only allows you to improve day-to-day operation of the organisation but also provides insight to achieve continual improvement.

Nick Shipton, new business manager, Kirona