The Next Generation of Using Location in Field Service

Field service optimization has come a long way towards minimizing travel time, thus leaving more “wrench time” available for performing more tasks per each field engineer’s day. While this is great news, it does indicate that it’s time for us to ask what can we do to get more tasks done within the same amount of “wrench time”. In other words: can we help service engineers complete jobs faster?
Well, we can, and we do. Field Service Mobility solutions, such as ClickMobile, speed up work in many ways, including reduction of paperwork, automation of reporting, and delivering the required knowledge and documentation – right information at the right time.
And yet, some interesting opportunities remain. One category of such opportunities has to do with the question: If we had a location technology that was far ahead of GPS in terms of signal availability? What if we could identify locations inside buildings, within “urban canyons:” (where high-rise buildings block GPS signals), and within large factories and facilities?
Quite a few technologies are under development, ranging from WiFi “hot spot” triangulation, through miniaturized inertial navigation, to the next generation in satellite navigation.
The European Space Agency’s Galileo project (http://www.esa.int/esaNA/galileo.html) will be Europe’s own global navigation satellite system, providing a highly accurate, guaranteed global positioning service under civilian control. It will be inter-operable with GPS and GLONASS, the two other global satellite navigation systems. As part of the Galileo initiative, ClickSoftware has received funding for a two-year research project aimed at exploring the field service applications of high-availability, high-accuracy location data.
So what could we do with this information? One example is identifying the locations, within a facility, of equipment, access panels, underground pipes etc.: The first service call may take some time to figure out these locations, but subsequent calls will benefit from guidance right to the spot where the service needs to be provided. This also applies to one team marking a location (e.g. in case of leakage) for another team to fix.
We have already identified quite a few other cases for using such location data for making field service more efficient, but undoubtedly there will be many more benefits we haven’t seen yet. Please take a minute to think about it:

How would you use location data during the performance of service tasks?

Author: Israel Beniaminy

Welcome to Clickipedia

Clickipedia is a new Blog from ClickSoftware designed to provide interesting thoughts and perspectives with regards to service delivery.Our contributors consist of individuals who have spent many years working with service organizations across industries and the world to streamline processes and optimize service decisions.
A recurrent theme of this Blog is around Service Optimization - a best practice for effective decision-making throughout the organization’s entire service operation. Companies that practice service optimization identify and eliminate costly inefficiencies around forecasting, planning, and scheduling. But these companies are still few and far between. ClickSoftware has the privilege of working with many of these companies and will be looking to share our experiences and domain expertise.



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The Quest for “kina'ole” (flawless service delivery)

Many of you have heard that the mission of the algorithm at the core of ClickSchedule is to “calculate the best technician with the right skills and the right tools, to get to the customer at the right time.” In the past we have referred to our algorithm as W6. It might be time to re-consider the name.
In her recent post to her blog (http://service.ducttapemarketing.com/) about service, Georgia Patrick characterizes the idea of service flawlessness, which in the native Hawaiian language is called kina'ole. More specifically this means: “Doing the right thing in the right way, at the right time, in the right place, to the right person, for the right reason, with the right feeling, the first time.”
Furthermore, “in ancient Hawaii, if you were skilled, trained or a professional in any line of work or service, the specific tasks or activities that you engaged in were expected to be performed without defect or flaw”. This appeals to me as an easily stated yet challenging paradigm for today’s real-time service chain. But service organizations should axiomatically strive for this goal.

But the hard reality of service experiences is that delivering flawless service is not always possible. Some service requests verge on the unreasonable. Yet how do we maintain a positive customer experience? Dennis Snow has some thoughts on this which he relates in his forthcoming book, Lessons from the Mouse. Every Disney cast member can tell you about funny questions Disney guests ask. How about “What time is the three o’clock parade?” or “Can we see where Walt Disney is frozen in the castle?” or “When will you be turning off the rain?” In the face of such seemingly silly questions, the inviolable Disney rule is never to make a guest feel stupid. Guests are out of their comfort zones, the place can be overwhelming, and it’s the cast member’s job to understand and address the question behind the question. For example, when a guest asks, “What time is the three o’clock parade?” cast members know the guest really wants to know, “What time does the three o’clock parade get here?” And those circumstances when a guest is completely in the wrong, the Disney philosophy is; “The guest may not always be right, but they will always be our guest.” Stated another way, “The guest may not always be right, but let’s allow them to be wrong with dignity.”
So summing up today’s post:
1) Strive for kina'ole - flawless service delivery
2) If that striving falls short, treat the customer with respect and dignity even in the face of unreasonableness.

Related link: Dennis Snow’s Speaking of Service Excellence Blog

Author: Rob Kaplan

Question of the day: Move the work or move the people?

It is common practice to relocate resources to areas that are busy from areas that don't have enough work to do. The question that arises when you relocate is “who manages the resources during their relocation period?” If the answer to that question is “the person that usually manages that resource”, then you may want to consider moving the work instead of the resource.

Now of course we can’t physically move the work; but what if you could send a task from your schedule to the schedule of a neighboring district and let them assign it to a resource that has capacity?

Relocating individual resources and crews is probably still the best practice in cases of long duration or long distance. But here are a couple of situations in which moving the work might be the best practice:
One-off tasks that need to be handled by a different skill set.
Tasks in neighboring districts where there is a short-term capacity shortage, due to say a meeting or someone out sick.

Often times we hear that this is being done manually via phone calls and emails, on an exception basis. If there were an easier way to move the work around to other resources, and still maintain visibility into the status of that work, would schedulers use this process more often?

Author: Andrea Bach

What's Faster Than Real-Time?

When things happen, you have to be agile – figure out what happened right away, understand the impact, and immediately change your actions and plans appropriately. The faster you do it, the better. That’s self-evident, isn't it?

Well, how fast can you be? Is it enough to respond with a few minutes or seconds, or does it have to be a millisecond? Is the ultimate agility where you respond instantly, or can you somehow do even better than that? Actually, you can, and you should.

Take rebounds in basketball, for example. Imagine a basketball player with lightning-fast reflexes and an awesome leap. He watches the ball hit the rim, sees the direction in which the ball bounces off, and immediately leaps to catch it. In most cases, his speed won’t help: someone who is just a bit slower will be there ahead of him. How does it happen? The trick is simple enough to describe, though is takes a lot of skill and practice: While the ball is still in flight towards the basket, predict where the ball will go if it rebounds, and move in that direction. If the ball rebounds, the best-positioned players will most likely get the rebound. If not, not much is lost. This is how prediction pays off, by responding before the event – indeed, faster than real-time. Of course, the other team’s players will try to position themselves well for the rebound, and you’d better predict that as well and prepare for it – often by collaborative and coordinated movements of the whole team.

So, "faster than real-time" is another way of saying that proactive is better than reactive, no matter how fast your reaction is. It isn’t easy in basketball, but you can’t be top players and teams without it. The same is true for field service: What if you knew that today’s workload is shaping up to be larger than usual? Could you do something about it? Certainly: You could move some preventive maintenance tasks from today to tomorrow, or you could dynamically change your appointment booking policy to offer fewer slots for today, etc. If you knew that a service engineer’s arrival at the next task location is likely to be delayed (e.g. using location monitoring, traffic updates or both), you could move the task to another engineer or reshuffle the engineer’s subsequent tasks. And if you knew how the numbers, locations and types of tasks would change next quarter, you’d know how to prepare for it. If you fail to do any of this, you’ll fail to score enough points with your customers. Even worse – your competitors may already be positioned to catch the rebound.

Author: Israel Beniaminy