Are you considering implementing systems to optimize routing and operational management of your mobile forces in your company? Good news if the answer is ‘Yes' ! But if so, setting out on such a project requires you to fully comprehend the current situation to ensure optimum conditions are in place for finding the right solution.
Through analysing the way things are done today, you can accurately gauge the precise needs of your teams, and also the margin for manoeuvre you have to:
The first step is to ‘take the temperature’ and analyse difficulties being experienced by your teams involved in scheduling. Making space so those who travel on a daily basis can speak to the problem is vital – technical staff, deliverers, installers, sales personnel, experts, auditors… not forgetting their managers and planning personnel.
The time devoted to this dialogue will reap untold benefits in helping you to identify the problems, better understand the need, and pinpoint priorities. In consulting the teams concerned in this first phase of the project, you kill two birds with one stone: obtaining the information you need on the one hand, and oiling the wheels for
There is a good chance your staff are currently shouldering the load of many different annoyances and difficulties in their work. These may appear more or less serious individually, but if they are constantly recurring or cumulative in negative impact they can adversely affect working conditions to the point of tangibly affecting productivity. Here are a few examples, unfortunately reported all too often:
These ongoing scenarios lead to inefficiency, stress, and interpersonal tensions, especially if they are accompanied by ongoing organisational hiccoughs and fragile workplace economics generally:
All of these inconvenient practicalities are a daily burden on mobile teams and affect motivation. The fact of having consulted and listened to your teams will allow you to identify all possible points for improvement, and the ones that need to be addressed as a priority.
The personnel putting schedules together often find it hard to balance routes over several teams and also to share the load equitably between members of the same team, so feelings about ‘unfair’ treatment or overload may run high at some unseen level. Reconciling operational demands and individual constraints is the daily lot of the planners. Time is often spent trying to replan routes to take variables into account such as absence of personnel due to sickness, delays, unplanned absences. Changes linked to customer needs are also constantly needing to be handled: unexpected absence, putting off a visit or last minute cancellations, not to speak of emergencies… These all have an impact on routes in progress, and engender extra communication with mobile resources. Preoccupied with these tasks, they have little time to consecrate to customers themselves and service quality.
The difficulties facing planners should not be taken lightly. As their role is crucial to the health of the organisation, and efficient routing, absence or departure of a member of the scheduling team will always be a problem, because replacements cannot be readily found: this role requires knowledge of the business, and of the customer’s business too. Knowledge about the people and the geography cannot be learnt in a day. If you want to keep your experienced planning personnel, it will be wise to spend time listening to them!
A satisfaction survey with customers will be useful to complete your researches and analysis as it will bring to light any reasons for dissatisfaction in relation to scheduling and visiting protocol: lack of flexibility in appointments offered, time windows for deliveries that are too long, lack of punctuality, or technical staff being sent who are not qualified for the intervention requested… This survey will allow you to create a hierarchy of the problems to be addressed, the prevalence of a problem, or frequency, so you can identify those needing urgent remedy because they are undermining customer loyalty, and the customer’s experience will certainly be communicated to anyone asking for a recommendation.
Once you have identified the weak points within your current organisation, you will be able to list all the points you need to improve on and identify expense accounts that could see real savings if the solution was implemented. Make sure your research and the customer survey include questions that will provide the detail you need to estimate economies the company realistically stands to make! |
To give you an idea as starting point, you can work on the assumption that an optimization solution could reduce your costs by 10-30%. Do the sums! Even at the lower end of this range, the saving you stand to make speaks volumes!