Work Simple
Finding a way
Businesses that are required to schedule tasks and assign them to their technicians without having the right tools to do so almost always “find a way”. Necessity if the mother of invention.
They may decide to use an “account” approach where field technicians have their own portfolios of “accounts” that only them can service. Any request from a specific account is then automatically routed to this agent and he has to figure out the best time for him to do the work.
Another approach is to have the supervisors assign work in the morning, during the toolbox session. Each supervisor having a relatively small team of agents can “kind of” keep in their minds who’s doing what and when.
A third possible approach is to set the rules of who/what/when well ahead of time in a predetermined routine schedule and let a system automatically spit these out, preassigned.
Siloed information
Either way, these solutions are all about creating small silos of information, small enough so that a single human being can keep it all in mind, while disregarding all other silos.
In all cases, these solution try to work around the difficulty of understanding the global picture of the field situation by - simply put - not even trying to understand the global picture.
The forest for the trees
While helping a customer migrate his data into RedbackWMS the other day, I quite literally heard the penny drop in the manager’s mind. In a split second, he understood what it was costing his business to silo his task scheduling.
The tool they had previously been using only allowed them to create a series of individual schedules with fixed assignees and then hope for the best on the day (everyday).
Their tool could then only present a view for each day as a calendar box.
So in reality, they had no way of visualising their day’s work and picking up inconsistencies and issues that may have occurred due to the rigidity or lack of foresight of their predetermined schedules.
In RedbackWMS, their data showed up, among other ways, in an overall Gantt view with field agents as swim lanes.
All of a sudden, he could see that his first agent on the list was double booked at 1pm for two different customers and has been so for the past few months. He could also see that, this same person had a 2 hour gap in the middle of the afternoon before his evening job.
For the past few months, this field agent had made arrangements with the client of the second 1pm task to arrive late; which was OK as he had an empty slot afterwards anyways and the client was happy to accommodate.
Same data, displayed better
Of course, the manager could have gone through all of his data and understood these types of issues long ago, but everyone is busy, and who has the time to sift through textual data anyway?
The first step to help get an overall understanding of field assignments is to get a proper visualisation tool that fits into the normal, everyday operational flow. If, with your visualisation, you can quickly pick up – and preempt – issues, you’ve won half the battle.
By simply visualising his task assignments in a way that made sense to him, this customer was able to accomplish a few things: