World’s largest scheduling and dispatch wall

I visited a company recently to discuss automating their field service operations. They had about 50 service techs in the field – subcontractor and permanent personnel responsible for performing services at a customer site. They had a lot to keep track of in the field. They’d send people on a job, or several jobs, then they’d come back and turn in paperwork or call back into the office when it was complete (for the office people to update “systems”). They needed to keep track of where people were dispatched to jobs and when they were available. They did that with one of the craziest manual systems I’ve ever seen in my life.

Walking into the scheduling and dispatcher’s office was a trip. Every wall of his office was covered with plexi-glass. The dispatcher had taken pinstriped tape and gridded the entire surface.  The customer work orders were placed into his inbox and the dispatcher would schedule it on the wall by writing the customer name and work order number into the corresponding box on the wall. 

His desk sat right in the center of the room and he used every wall in his office for scheduling and dispatch. He had a ladder with wheels on it. He would wheel that ladder all over the room and climb up to the wall and update it. This guy had dry marker all over his shirt and under his fingernails. He lived by and on that scheduling wall.

When we started talking about field service automation he got that glazed look in his eye like, “Please let this be something that I can use because this is insane.” He was retired, it was his son’s business, but he had come out of retirement to help fix their scheduling problem. 

Consequently, he developed the scheduling wall. Automating this process could transform the company. This guy knew it but at the same time he was kind of married to his system because he was doing it all day every day for 12 hours a day. To give him credit, it worked. But it was terribly inefficient.

Whenever you think about moving from a manual system that involves whiteboards, grease-boards, clipboard or lateral wall filing systems, you’re talking about making the business more fluid. And when you make the business more fluid you can increase customer satisfaction, by saving steps and getting to them sooner. 

Whenever you think about moving from a manual system that involves whiteboards, grease-boards, clipboard or lateral wall filing systems, you’re talking about making the business more fluid.

The employees in the field are not driving back and forth; they are connected by their mobile device and saving time, being more efficient. It can also improve cash flow because you’re billing right away rather than waiting for paperwork or information to make it back to the office for verification. All of these efficiencies affect the business’s bottom line.

In the time span of just a few weeks, the scheduling wall was disassembled. In its place was a field service system which created a color-coded Gantt chart on his screen. From one computer screen, the dispatcher could see all of the jobs and all of the people. Jobs were color coded for scheduled, in process and completed; as the employees in the field started and completed their jobs, which they entered into their mobile device, the chart automatically changed.

A mapping system running in parallel showed the same information visually and geographically.  If a service tech was running ahead of schedule, jobs could automatically be added by dragging and dropping them from the old slot to the new slot.

The primary effect this had on the dispatcher was to make him incredibly more efficient. He was able to dispatch information into the field tech’s hand immediately; rather than calling techs to see where they were, then climbing up onto the ladder, scheduling it, then calling or texting the person he assigned the job to. There’s a huge increase in productivity and it eliminates errors.

If I can look at a screen and see where my employees are and what state their jobs are in, look at pictures of the job, etc., before the job is completed, I’ve got greater visibility into my business which means that I can react much faster and make better business decisions. I help my customers, I make more money, I save time and gas. These are tremendous benefits.

The biggest effect of automating a field service operation is the increase in productivity. This is widely recognized by industry analysts like Gartner that watch this space. With a more efficient system, steps are saved; you can do more jobs in a day with the same amount of people. That adds up. On the low end, those increases in productivity equate to about a 20% improvement, which equates roughly to a 17% increase in revenue. 

Could you benefit from a 17% increase in revenue?