Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management

Transcription

1 Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management

2 Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management By planning, executing and monitoring long-term trends and short-term, dynamic events, you can address the full lifecycle of mobile workforce management and continuously achieve your operational goals. Planning Planning is an ongoing, continuous decision-making effort and is a critical link to productivity in your business processes. You must plan along The Planning Spectrum from daily optimizations to long-term planning. The Planning Spectrum is a continuum of planning practices, including exception management processes. You must focus on your business objectives, ensuring that your objectives have a positive effect on your planning process. In fact, you must focus more on your business objectives and less on constraints. Many field service organizations plan with constraints (e.g., zones) that are unnecessary and negatively impact your planning process. You must include your customers preferences in your planning process (e.g., appointment booking, short time windows). When is it convenient for your customers to receive your service? With smart devices, there are even more opportunities to improve collaboration and communication and enhance the information provided on the smart device itself. Execution When your mobile workforce rolls out every day, you must be prepared to proactively deal with exceptions to your plans. You must provide visibility to all your stakeholders and increase collaboration and communication within your organization as well as with your sub-contractors and your customers. Better collaboration and communication can lead to better exception management. Monitoring You need visibility into historical and real-time information to enable reporting and to share the wealth of information. Developing and practicing continuous performance management helps you monitor progress towards your business objectives (which may change with time), and enables continuous improvement towards achieving your goals. ViryaNet Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management 2

3 Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management 1) You need to take a different approach. We know from a recent Aberdeen survey that many field service organizations are not meeting their goals, and that the majority of field service organizations have demonstrated very little improvement in key metrics. You must balance contradicting business objectives, manage exceptions, and respond to changing business needs. Achieving operational improvements despite these challenges requires more than an outstanding mobile workforce management solution; it requires an approach that can facilitate change. You must ensure that a business-value focus is maintained throughout the full lifecycle of your mobile workforce solution from the implementation process to a structured program throughout the lifetime of the solution. Performance management is a process of defining your goals, identifying the respective business questions and the related key performance indicators (KPIs), measuring and analyzing, making and acting on informed business decisions, and measuring again. Your corrective actions may include changes to the structure of your workforce, improvements to employee performance, changes to planning policies and or business processes. By establishing or expanding a performance management practice, you can gain visibility into the contributing factors to your productivity, workforce effectiveness, customer experience, financials and internal business processes. Your performance management practice would include mobile workforce management metrics and analysis. Recommendation: Develop and practice continuous performance management to maximize your opportunity to improve on your business goals, implement change, enable differentiation, and provide for continuous improvement. ViryaNet Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management 3

4 2) You need to focus on user experience. When an organization is deploying a complex solution like mobile workforce management, they expect users to learn to use the new system quickly, integrate it into their work processes, and become proficient enough to allow the organization to realize the solution s full benefits. However, enterprise software is often criticized for poor user experience, resulting in less efficient and less engaged employees. You need to focus on providing an exceptional user experience and take advantage of the opportunities enabled by the mobile revolution to gain visibility into information in real-time and with the appropriate context. Field applications designed to run natively on smartphones and tablets offer an exceptional user experience and leverage the features of mobile devices to ensure your field workforce remains on plan, whether on the road or at the work site. Contextually relevant information can align your field technicians with the current plan. Revolutionize the way your dispatchers (supervisors and branch managers) work. You can change the way dispatchers (supervisors and branch managers) work, allowing them to be more focused and effective. Your mobile workforce management system should proactively look for exceptions and provide the context for resolving those exceptions. Moving forward, your mobile workforce management solution should combine sophisticated backend services to look for exceptions and provide the context to solve them and an exceptional mobile user experience. This combination will help your service organization enjoy both a centralized view and decision support logic, while empowering the workers in the field. Recommendation: To support a multi-device environment, focus on the mobile user experience and optimize the dynamics between the office and the field. ViryaNet Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management 4

5 3) You need planning tools and extensibility options. You have to plan for the moment and for the future. You need a complete set of resource planning tools to help you manage the entire planning spectrum, allowing you to: Apply predictive business intelligence to help you with strategic resource decisions, for example: How many people do you need? What should be their skill set? And where should they be located? When applying strategic planning tools, you can expect to improve operational metrics, such as, workforce utilization and management of overtime. Manage a work backlog of long-term, already-made commitments by optimally pre-selecting the ideal date to perform given tasks. By analzying short-term and long-term commitments together and optimally inserts low-priority jobs in the vicinity of the higherpriority jobs, your solution should ensure that longterm commitments are met without compromising higher-priority jobs andwhile maximizing the utilization of your resources. The expected operational benefits are minimizing travel times, maximizing the workforce utilization and improving percentages of SLAs met (internal or external). Proactively respond to exceptions using a combination of real-time information monitoring and a variety of automatic, semiautomatic and manual re-planning tools. Based on events reported from the field (many of them, such as, arriving on site and leaving site can be automated), your mobile workforce management system should apply respective processes to discover and manage exceptions. Ongoing optimization results in a more effective workforce and better service. Recommendation: Daily optimization and exception management is not enough. You must have the tools to manage the strategic workforce buildup process and optimally decide when to do what when running your Optimizer for weeks in advance. ViryaNet Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management 5 Strategic Planning Forecasting work and planning resources Tactical Planning Backlog management Scheduling Optimization Scheduling assignments Ongoing Optimization Exception management

6 Align daily schedules with your prioritized business objectives. You must assure optimal daily schedules that best reflect your service business priorities. Your mobile workforce management solution should utilize a scheduling engine that optimizes for multiple (likely conflicting) business objectives, guided only by your service priorities and not relying on a subjective, cumbersome tuning exercise. If your mobile workforce management solution can auto-tune its scheduling algorithm, you can avoid the risk of an optimized schedule one day and a far-fromoptimal schedule, once the data changes. These features result in a much more robust optimization engine that best reflects the balance you want to achieve between different business objectives. At the end of the day, a good schedule is not about achieving a single operational goal, but finding the balance between contradicting business goals, such as: minimizing travel times, assigning high priority jobs first, and balancing the workload between your field technicians. Recommendation: Your mobile workforce management solution should support the concept of optimizing for multiple objectives and should not require a cumbersome tuning process. Once the software s configuration is set, the Optimizer should automatically adapt to different data sets (e.g., differences between a very busy schedule and less busy schedule).in addition, your mobile workforce management solution should automatically tune the optimization engine to ensure optimization quality. ViryaNet Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management 6

7 Build on industry best practices, while cost-effectively integrating your service organization DNA with the overall solution. You must develop customized functionality that is not intrusive, allowing you to: Meet the demanding requirements of your business users Self-rely on your IT resources or any resource with generally available skills (not depending on expensive, proprietary technical knowledge) Avoid intrusive code development that can be expensive to maintain and difficult to upgrade A solution that embeds a standard-based Business Process Engine can capture the essence of scheduling, dispatch and exception management in field service, while remaining extensible and focused on continuous improvement. For example, exception management processes can improve operational metrics, such as, customer satisfaction (with better control of the communication process to a customer when a technician is late) or compliance (through the drip-feeding process that reveals the next one or two jobs to the field technician, ensuring the plan is followed). Recommendation: Avoid proprietary tools for extending the functionality of your mobile workforce management solution. If you use a proprietary tool, in most cases, there will be a need to write intrusive, customized code that can only be done by the vendor and will be costly when it comes to maintenance and future upgrades. ViryaNet Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management 7

8 About ViryaNet ViryaNet delivers mobile workforce management solutions that intelligently guide, automate, and optimize both simple and complex field service work, resulting in measurable business benefits. ViryaNet s products, prepackaged solutions and people are recognized within the industry as innovative which in turn enables its customers to be viewed as leaders within their respective industries. ViryaNet s G4 products specialize in the functions of scheduling and dispatching resources and enabling mobile field communication and are delivered in industry specific configurations. Embedding industry best practices and utilizing innovative technologies like ViryaNet s BPM Blueprint for Mobile Workforce Management, Microsoft InfoPath and device agnostic mobile solutions enable ViryaNet s products to be rapidly deployed and extended to support virtually any business process across a wide range of industries. ViryaNet is proud to call many of the world s leading utilities, the United States largest pure rural telecommunications firm, the supermarkets most respected retailer, and North America s largest auto insurer as customers. ViryaNet has strong partnerships with leading platform and system integration companies that enable it to have a global presence. Headquartered in Westborough, MA, ViryaNet has additional offices in the United States and Israel. For more information visit our website or follow us on twitter. ViryaNet Best Practices in Mobile Workforce Management 8