Can Field Service be Globalized?

The aging workforce is a real problem. Here’s one of many references to it, quoting from the August 4 issue of the “Above the noise” e-newsletter by AMR Research:

“In the United States, 60 million baby boomers will leave the workforce by 2025, while less than 40 million will enter it. There are dire predictions that we will need twice as many experienced IT professionals as will be available in the near future. We also see significant talent issues in building effective global supply chain organizations. Talent will continue to be a major issue for the foreseeable future. …That all said, if we assume that the potential productivity benefits from this changing nature of work won’t be enough, then globalization comes into play. The world population is predicted to grow to more than 9 billion by mid-century from 6.5 billion people today. In the next 20 years, 1.2 billion people in India and China will enter the workforce, and the rest of Asia, Eastern Europe, and Central America will add significant numbers as well. The bottom line is that each of these emerging economies represent growing sources of labor, and should more than make up for shortages in traditional first world countries. We’re already seeing this is in the massive growth of India, Inc. service firms. We expect this to continue with much of the global talent pool increasingly coming through third-party services organizations.”

Now consider field service in the “first world”, where the labor force will be shrinking. Field service, as we know it today, requires on-site physical presence, so it depends on locally available workforces. Field service productivity will rise. New technologies will reduce the need for field service visits, possibly through “self-healing” or remote maintenance. However, will such developments be enough to offset the gaps in talent availability? Probably not.

So bear with me as I ask a strange question: Is it possible to utilize the growing talent pool from emerging economies to close the talent gap for first-world field service? Is it possible to do so without relocation? Can we imagine a technician in Bulgaria fixing a washing machine in California?

“Remote field service”? Sounds like an oxymoron, a built-in contradiction. More to the point, it also sounds impossible. However, extraordinary challenges justify extraordinary questions.
Here’s one idea for future development: Remember that we have over a decade before the worst part of the crisis hits. Maybe the service organization would dispatch a robot, or gain temporary control of a household robot, and the remote technician will tele-operate that robot? After all, it shouldn’t be more risky than remote surgery, which has already been successfully performed many times.



Do you agree that the upcoming talent gap is a real issue for field service? If so, what do you think can be done about it? Do you see any solutions which involve the paradox of “remote field service”? Let me know what you think.

Author: Israel Beniaminy

ClickSoftware researchers contribute to new book on algorithms for vehicle routing

A new book coming out in November 2008, “Bio-inspired Algorithms for the Vehicle Routing Problem”, includes nine chapters contributed by academic and industrial researchers. We are honored that the book’s editors chose to have one of these chapters authored by four people employed by, or associated with, ClickSoftware. The same people are also associated with several academic research institutes in the UK and in Israel.
The book’s publisher, Springer, includes it in the prestigious “Studies in Computational Intelligence” series, and describes the book as follows:

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is one of the most famous combinatorial optimization problems. In simple terms, the goal is to determine a set of routes with overall minimum cost that can satisfy several geographical scattered demands. Biological inspired computation is a field devoted to the development of computational tools modeled after principles that exist in natural systems. The adoption of such design principles enables the production of problem solving techniques with enhanced robustness and flexibility, able to tackle complex optimization situations.

The goal of the volume is to present a collection of state-of-the-art contributions describing recent developments concerning the application of bio-inspired algorithms to the VRP. Over the 9 chapters, different algorithmic approaches are considered and a diverse set of problem variants are addressed. Some contributions focus on standard benchmarks widely adopted by the research community, while others address real-world situations.

The chapter contributed by ClickSoftware is titled “When the rubber meets the road: Bio-inspired field service scheduling in the real world”. It describes the complexity of business problems of field service scheduling, defines a framework for characterizing variants of such problems and supporting efficient solutions, describes some experimental algorithms which were developed and tested on top of this framework, and discusses some issues influencing the willingness of the workforce to accept automatically generated schedules and routes. These experimental algorithms involve adaptations of bio-inspired computer-science disciplines such as Genetic Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimization.

Copyright issues prevent us from posting a copy of the chapter on this blog. If you’re interested in discussing this further, please post a comment or contact ClickSoftware.

Who Ultimately Owns The Customer Experience?

4 Factors that will Make Customers Stay: 19 Jun 2008
Customers are really easy to please—if you know how. The basics are these four factors, which can be found on the Cust Serv blog, which in turn quotes the bHaratbHasha site. These make a lot of sense, too.

1. Accuracy: Give accurate information and billing of services. If you wouldn’t want to be duped. Also make it clear to your customers the process or procedure of doing business with them. It’s frustrating to feel lost and dumb.

2. Availability: Be always there for your customers, ready to lend an ear or a hand. And when you have made yourself available, be happy and attentive and make the customers feel that you genuinely want to help him out and serve him.

3. Partnership: Customers love it when they feel like partners and not strangers. All the more they prefer it when you treat them like kings. You see, like you, your customers want the service they deserve and more.

4. Advice: Put knowledgeable and professional customer reps in the front line. Let customers feel respected by having someone really capable of helping and serving them. It’s annoying to be speaking with somebody who cannot connect with you.

If 4 Factors are not formal enough for you, then how about 21 real world Lessons that can be read in less than an hour. Blogger Glenn Ross cites the short 81 page More Loyal Customers: 21 Real World Lessons To Keep Your Customers Coming Back by Kevin Stirtz as a worthy read. See more at http://www.stirtzgroup.com/.

In a conversation this week with a veteran subway train operator, I was reminded of the fact that we are each the ultimate owners of our customer experiences. Ownership has rights and responsibilities. My airplane experience may be impacted by a late take-off if I don’t rise out of my seat and help a struggling senior citizen lift a roll-away into the luggage bin. But if an unruly youth on the subway is “disturbing the peace” do I risk being confronted by a “piece” and ask the youth to act more courteously? Perhaps so, perhaps not; other factors would come into play, but either way the “experience” is mine, and the train operators are limited in their ability to ensure my positive experience. Understanding the service operators’ limitations makes me a “righteous” consumer. Now, were the service provider’s limits clear to me? And as a service provider to the extent that I economically push beyond existing service boundaries, will I not create competitive advantage for myself?

Author: Rob Kaplan

The Dilemma of Rising Fuel Prices

As someone who has a long commute into the office, I am very familiar with how the rising price in fuel is hitting the wallet. 12 months ago, it cost me around £30 to fill up my vehicle but today the cost was £60. When I glanced at the dial indicating the cost, I was shocked. Once I had made sure that the fuel was not simply leaking out the bottom of my vehicle, I went into the station and paid.

Getting back into my car, I switched on the radio and the presenter was interviewing a Fleet Manager from a local council in Scotland. This particular individual was responsible for a fleet of vehicles that carried out various public services ranging from mowing the lawn and maintaining street lighting to public transportation and gritting the roads during icy conditions.

He said that when he submitted his budget for the year it was based on a cost of 91 pence per litre of petrol. However, with petrol prices currently around 120 pence per litre he is expecting to be £200k over budget. He was faced with the choice of either finding ways to become more efficient or simply cutting public services. One of the public services that he felt was at real risk was road gritting.

The rising cost of fuel is forcing service providers to introduce measures designed to help meet these costs. For example, one police force in the US has decided to increase fines for offending motorists. From 1 July, motorists caught in Holly Springs, Georgia, will have to pay an extra $12 (£6) to cover the costs of police chasing them down. The town's police chief says the "fuel surcharge" will generate up to $26,000 (£13,000) in revenue per year. Recent $4-a-gallon fuel costs have forced other police forces in the US to turn to unusual cost-saving measures. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, police patrols are being ordered out of their cars and onto cycle and foot patrols. In South Fayette, also in Pennsylvania, officers have been told not to sit parked up with air conditioning on. The local police chief told his patrols: "If you want to stay cool, park under a tree."

Cutting services and/or increasing prices are not the only option that companies are faced with. . They should look at everything from eco-friendly driver training, to improved vehicle maintenance, street-level routing and schedule optimization.

Here is one tip to reduce your fuel bill:

Improve route planning – Companies should consider more actively planning efficient routes for field technicians to maximize fuel efficiency. Doing so effectively requires better schedule management. Greater overall efficiency arises from transforming fuel cost management into overall travel management by ensuring the right people with the right skills are doing the right things at the right time. It’s true that companies can reduce total mileage by a few percentage points by minimizing unauthorized trips and helping drivers pick short routes. However, efficiently assigning tasks to mobile workers can reduce travel by as much as 20 percent.

Street-level routing (SLR) can help companies significantly reduce travel time and increase “wrench time” – time completing jobs. Combined with GPS, SLR not only lets managers know where there resources are throughout the day, it also ensures drivers travel the most efficient distances between jobs, further reducing fuel consumption. SLR takes into account myriad variables including one-way streets, congested neighborhoods, slow-moving highways, etc. and calculates the optimal route each driver should take – reducing travel time and gas consumption and ensuring on-time arrivals.

Author: Simon Morris

Solar Cycle Forecasting

For both the energy and telecommunications industries, any information that would help predict the dynamic work they do is of value to the forecasting and planning groups.

Last year I came upon this article http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/sunspot.shtml which explained that for the first time, NCAR (the National Center for Atmospheric Research), believes that they can predict cycles of sun storms years in advance. The forecasting model was 98% accurate in simulating the last eight solar cycles.


I recently led a forecasting and planning workshop with an energy utility and thought of this article and how the sun storm predictions could be used to build this particular utility’s forecasted demand. Much like how they use weather predictions to forecast the demands from forest fires or the rain storms during an El Niño year.

As I reread the article, I realized that the forecasting process that the NCAR scientists are using to predict the solar cycles is similar to the mathematical approach to forecasting and planning in our own solutions. By taking the historical data and applying a formulated approach and then analyzing the results in order to account for anomalies, the efficiency and effectiveness of the forecasting process is vastly improved.

Author: Andrea Bach