Mobile computing is fast becoming a mainstream requirement as society shifts toward a decentralized and more mobile workforce. For many field service companies, business factors including customer demand for superior service, and business process reengineering efforts, are necessitating significant investment in mobile computing technologies.
As field service organizations search for solutions to maximize efficiencies across the enterprise, momentum towards mobile workforce management solutions is building. Industry driving forces are changing the way in which companies compete, work with suppliers, and offer services to customers. Deregulation, globalization, rising customer expectations, decreasing operational budgets, reduced workforces and technological changes are rapidly increasing competition in the marketplace. Pressures from every side are driving companies to do more with less—to increase customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs.
More than any other enterprise application, a Mobile Workforce Management (MWFM) solution can help companies do just that. But which solution is best? The wrong one may solve only a subset of your problems and force you to pour money into a never-ending project in an attempt to get it right. The right solution can give you an immediate and measurable return on your investment and directly affect your bottom line.
A MWFM solution is critical to achieving corporate objectives of increased market share and improved profitability. It will help you (i) retain existing customers and attract new customers by improving customer service, and (ii) reduce operating costs by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery. MWFM provides you with the tool you need to respond to competitive pressures and to achieve a competitive advantage in your industry.
Understanding the Mobile Workforce Advantage
Service providers are confronted daily with the difficult task of optimally assigning work requests to their field force, dispatching work from the office to the field, monitoring the progress of the work, and responding to changing conditions. In addition, field service organizations must measure workforce performance in order to improve the quality of strategic forecasting and planning efforts. In contrast with time-consuming and inefficient paper-based systems, mobile workforce management systems manage, schedule, and dispatch work for mobile engineers and technicians – all wirelessly and in real-time. Work assigned to technicians is delivered wirelessly to the workforce in the field using laptops or hand-held mobile devices like Pocket PCs; as work progresses, technicians send completed information wirelessly back to the enterprise.
Specific workforce challenges that impact daily field service operations include:
Faced with these business challenges, many field service operations are choosing to implement a MWFM solution to achieve a number of strategic business goals including:
Two Canadian companies, ATCO Gas and FortisAlberta, have implemented MWFM solutions and have realized significant return on their investment as a result through improved operational efficiency, productivity and customer satisfaction.
ATCO Gas
Part of the ATCO Group of companies, ATCO Gas provides safe, reliable delivery of natural gas to more than 2.4 million customers in almost 300 communities in the province of Alberta Canada. The ATCO Group is one of Canada's premier corporations, and is actively engaged in Power Generation, Utilities, Logistics and Energy Services, Technologies and Industrials.
The company has more than 90 years of experience providing natural gas service to homes, farms and businesses. Headquartered in Edmonton Alberta, ATCO Gas has approximately 1,600 employees and 57 district offices across the province. ATCO owns and operates a safe, reliable natural gas distribution system comprised of 34,000 kilometers of pipeline throughout Alberta.
ATCO Gas’ MWFM solution is owned and operated by ATCO I-Tek, a separate division of the ATCO Group, which provides call center, information technology, network infrastructure, applications software development and integration services.
At ATCO, fifty dispatchers and 370 mobile technicians use their enterprise workforce management solution to manage a variety of gas service work, including inspection, meter reading, customer complaints, and appliance repair. On average, their system dispatches 1700 work orders to the field each day, with approximately 100 orders per day on the weekends.
Orders generated in ATCO’s proprietary customer information system (CIS) are sent to their MWFM system for dissemination to the field force. Mobile technicians communicate with the enterprise wirelessly and in real-time, using HP iPAQ Pocket PC’s over a CDMA 1XRTT network by Telus Mobility.
Investing in Next-Generation WFM technologies
An MDSI customer since implementing Advantex r4 in 1989, ATCO made the strategic decision to upgrade its system from r7.4 to r7.6 in June 2004 to address their evolving mobile workforce management needs. And the results of the upgrade project were impressive.
Traditionally, upgrading enterprise-level software has taken months, sometimes as long as the initial implementation, and has required the help of the software vendor or IT consultants. No more. ATCO Gas demonstrated how easy it could be to upgrade an enterprise workforce management system. They successfully upgraded their system in just a weekend with a minimum of technical support and no unplanned system downtime.
"As this was our first time through a baseline system upgrade, we wanted the comfort of having MDSI engineers on-site, in case something went wrong. We were pleased to find that our team was able to do most of the work themselves. It was a very easy upgrade," saysErrol Seim, Work Management Project Team Lead for Atco I-Tek.
After having invested significant time in configuring their mobile workforce management solution to meet their unique business needs, ATCO was very pleased to find that all configuration changes they had made came through the upgrade and performed as expected. ATCO’s WFM solution also incorporates the use of an advanced configuration tool set, enabling ATCO to make configuration changes themselves without the need for technical support staff.
As a result of the upgrade, ATCO Gas users were quickly able to appreciate the changes. Dispatchers were thankful for the improved text messaging. Field technicians noticed enhancements in the mobile application, like better drop down menus and greater overall application performance. And because all of the configuration work that ATCO Gas had done was carried forward to the new version, users didn't have to relearn a thing. Given the success of this upgrade project and in support of its continued growth, ATCO successfully automated the work of an additional 170 service staff in December 2004.
ROI Benefits Achieved
ATCO has achieved benefits beyond its expectations with its initial implementation of a MWFM solution, including widespread operational efficiencies, productivity improvements, and cost savings.
To date, specific tangible benefits include:
FortisAlberta
FortisAlberta is an electric utility with more than 407,000 rural and urban customers located in Alberta, Canada. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fortis Inc. – a diversified, international electric utility company with 4000 employees operating utilities in 5 provinces of Canada, Belize and Cayman Islands. FortisAlberta owns and operates approximately 96,000 KM of low voltage distribution lines in Alberta and serves its customers with a workforce of construction and operations technicians. There are 180 operations technicians that deal with the bulk of the customer service orders including such things as new service connections, power outage calls, and streetlight repairs.
Drivers for Change: Service and Billing Delays Impact the Bottom Line
In the late nineties, the operations workflow at FortisAlberta’s 53 small local area offices was primarily paper-based and fraught with delays. The existing workflow lacked the ability to provide field technicians with up-to-the-minute customer information and was not well suited to ensure effective utilization of resources over such a large service territory as Alberta.The company realized that it had to change the service delivery model to better meet the needs of customers.
In 1998, the company committed to implementing a MWFM solution across the organization to improve customer service and to optimize operational efficiencies. The strategic business goals for the implementation project were to:
The Solution: Service Transformation through Real-Time Information Access
In 1998, as part of several business process improvements the company centralized the work dispatch process by implementing MDSI’s Advantex r5.3 MWFM solution and automating the maintenance, construction and emergency work of 180 Power Line technicians. Fortis Alberta’s MWFM solution is integrated with a SAP CCI customer information system and R3 systems for maintenance and construction work.
"Our MWFM solution has given us greater visibility of the workload and has enabled us to more effectively deploy our resources to meet the priority needs of our customers. As a result, we have the right resource assigned to the right job at a significant cost savings to the customer," comments Craig Taylor, Supervisor, Resources and Scheduling for FortisAlberta.
ROI Benefits Achieved
FortisAlberta has achieved many significant benefits as a result of its initial implementation of a MWFM solution, including the following:
Thus, the implementation of MWFM solutions at both ATCO Gas and FortisAlberta has yielded significant benefits for both companies including improved operational efficiency for field service representatives and dispatchers. The MWFM solution in each case has allowed for better asset management and resource deployment decisions as well as improved visibility into the status of customer service orders. Furthermore, the MWFM solutions have proved to be a cost effective replacement of older legacy systems that were becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. Most importantly, the operational benefits achieved by both ATCO Gas and FortisAlberta have yielded significant improvements in service levels that have been passed on to customers.
About the Author
Simon Jacobs, Director, Product Management for MDSI, has 18 years of experience in software development, requirements analysis, and product management. Mr. Jacobs holds a Bachelors of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo and a Masters of Science in mathematics and computer science from the University of British Columbia
As field service organizations search for solutions to maximize efficiencies across the enterprise, momentum towards mobile workforce management solutions is building. Industry driving forces are changing the way in which companies compete, work with suppliers, and offer services to customers. Deregulation, globalization, rising customer expectations, decreasing operational budgets, reduced workforces and technological changes are rapidly increasing competition in the marketplace. Pressures from every side are driving companies to do more with less—to increase customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs.
More than any other enterprise application, a Mobile Workforce Management (MWFM) solution can help companies do just that. But which solution is best? The wrong one may solve only a subset of your problems and force you to pour money into a never-ending project in an attempt to get it right. The right solution can give you an immediate and measurable return on your investment and directly affect your bottom line.
A MWFM solution is critical to achieving corporate objectives of increased market share and improved profitability. It will help you (i) retain existing customers and attract new customers by improving customer service, and (ii) reduce operating costs by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery. MWFM provides you with the tool you need to respond to competitive pressures and to achieve a competitive advantage in your industry.
Understanding the Mobile Workforce Advantage
Service providers are confronted daily with the difficult task of optimally assigning work requests to their field force, dispatching work from the office to the field, monitoring the progress of the work, and responding to changing conditions. In addition, field service organizations must measure workforce performance in order to improve the quality of strategic forecasting and planning efforts. In contrast with time-consuming and inefficient paper-based systems, mobile workforce management systems manage, schedule, and dispatch work for mobile engineers and technicians – all wirelessly and in real-time. Work assigned to technicians is delivered wirelessly to the workforce in the field using laptops or hand-held mobile devices like Pocket PCs; as work progresses, technicians send completed information wirelessly back to the enterprise.
Specific workforce challenges that impact daily field service operations include:
- Making and keeping customer commitments
- Completing planned work without overtime
- Responding quickly to emergency situations
- Making the most productive use of the mobile workforce
- Providing technicians easy access to the information they need
- Automating the collection and validation of field data
- Reducing travel times
Faced with these business challenges, many field service operations are choosing to implement a MWFM solution to achieve a number of strategic business goals including:
- Improvements in the immediate accessibility of customer information to field representatives during the workday.
- Real-time status updates of customer work orders and account histories.
- Improved distribution of customer work orders to field representatives according to representative location, availability and skill set for optimized efficiency.
- Consolidated data and improved visibility into field operations to provide insight into how to maximize work force efficiency.
Two Canadian companies, ATCO Gas and FortisAlberta, have implemented MWFM solutions and have realized significant return on their investment as a result through improved operational efficiency, productivity and customer satisfaction.
ATCO Gas
Part of the ATCO Group of companies, ATCO Gas provides safe, reliable delivery of natural gas to more than 2.4 million customers in almost 300 communities in the province of Alberta Canada. The ATCO Group is one of Canada's premier corporations, and is actively engaged in Power Generation, Utilities, Logistics and Energy Services, Technologies and Industrials.
The company has more than 90 years of experience providing natural gas service to homes, farms and businesses. Headquartered in Edmonton Alberta, ATCO Gas has approximately 1,600 employees and 57 district offices across the province. ATCO owns and operates a safe, reliable natural gas distribution system comprised of 34,000 kilometers of pipeline throughout Alberta.
ATCO Gas’ MWFM solution is owned and operated by ATCO I-Tek, a separate division of the ATCO Group, which provides call center, information technology, network infrastructure, applications software development and integration services.
At ATCO, fifty dispatchers and 370 mobile technicians use their enterprise workforce management solution to manage a variety of gas service work, including inspection, meter reading, customer complaints, and appliance repair. On average, their system dispatches 1700 work orders to the field each day, with approximately 100 orders per day on the weekends.
Orders generated in ATCO’s proprietary customer information system (CIS) are sent to their MWFM system for dissemination to the field force. Mobile technicians communicate with the enterprise wirelessly and in real-time, using HP iPAQ Pocket PC’s over a CDMA 1XRTT network by Telus Mobility.
Investing in Next-Generation WFM technologies
An MDSI customer since implementing Advantex r4 in 1989, ATCO made the strategic decision to upgrade its system from r7.4 to r7.6 in June 2004 to address their evolving mobile workforce management needs. And the results of the upgrade project were impressive.
Traditionally, upgrading enterprise-level software has taken months, sometimes as long as the initial implementation, and has required the help of the software vendor or IT consultants. No more. ATCO Gas demonstrated how easy it could be to upgrade an enterprise workforce management system. They successfully upgraded their system in just a weekend with a minimum of technical support and no unplanned system downtime.
"As this was our first time through a baseline system upgrade, we wanted the comfort of having MDSI engineers on-site, in case something went wrong. We were pleased to find that our team was able to do most of the work themselves. It was a very easy upgrade," saysErrol Seim, Work Management Project Team Lead for Atco I-Tek.
After having invested significant time in configuring their mobile workforce management solution to meet their unique business needs, ATCO was very pleased to find that all configuration changes they had made came through the upgrade and performed as expected. ATCO’s WFM solution also incorporates the use of an advanced configuration tool set, enabling ATCO to make configuration changes themselves without the need for technical support staff.
As a result of the upgrade, ATCO Gas users were quickly able to appreciate the changes. Dispatchers were thankful for the improved text messaging. Field technicians noticed enhancements in the mobile application, like better drop down menus and greater overall application performance. And because all of the configuration work that ATCO Gas had done was carried forward to the new version, users didn't have to relearn a thing. Given the success of this upgrade project and in support of its continued growth, ATCO successfully automated the work of an additional 170 service staff in December 2004.
ROI Benefits Achieved
ATCO has achieved benefits beyond its expectations with its initial implementation of a MWFM solution, including widespread operational efficiencies, productivity improvements, and cost savings.
To date, specific tangible benefits include:
- Reduction in the number of employees
- Increase in volume of work
- Reduction in amount of paperwork
- Heightened customer safety, service and satisfaction
- Improved customer and asset data quality through reduced data entry errors
- Increased number of completed appointments
- Reduced support costs with the ability to configure the system themselves
FortisAlberta
FortisAlberta is an electric utility with more than 407,000 rural and urban customers located in Alberta, Canada. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fortis Inc. – a diversified, international electric utility company with 4000 employees operating utilities in 5 provinces of Canada, Belize and Cayman Islands. FortisAlberta owns and operates approximately 96,000 KM of low voltage distribution lines in Alberta and serves its customers with a workforce of construction and operations technicians. There are 180 operations technicians that deal with the bulk of the customer service orders including such things as new service connections, power outage calls, and streetlight repairs.
Drivers for Change: Service and Billing Delays Impact the Bottom Line
In the late nineties, the operations workflow at FortisAlberta’s 53 small local area offices was primarily paper-based and fraught with delays. The existing workflow lacked the ability to provide field technicians with up-to-the-minute customer information and was not well suited to ensure effective utilization of resources over such a large service territory as Alberta.The company realized that it had to change the service delivery model to better meet the needs of customers.
In 1998, the company committed to implementing a MWFM solution across the organization to improve customer service and to optimize operational efficiencies. The strategic business goals for the implementation project were to:
- Reduce the number of people involved in coordinating daily work.
- Create better visibility of the total work and resources available to more effectively meet the priority needs of our customers
- Automate the order completion process and the delivery of information back to the Customer Information system
- Reduce manual data entry time and increase data accuracy.
- Automate the time entry process.
- Improve customer response time and troubleshooting ability.
- Improve the coordination and routing of work across multiple areas for large storms or outages.
- Improve data reporting, trend analysis and forecasting ability in terms of order volumes by month, and year.
The Solution: Service Transformation through Real-Time Information Access
In 1998, as part of several business process improvements the company centralized the work dispatch process by implementing MDSI’s Advantex r5.3 MWFM solution and automating the maintenance, construction and emergency work of 180 Power Line technicians. Fortis Alberta’s MWFM solution is integrated with a SAP CCI customer information system and R3 systems for maintenance and construction work.
"Our MWFM solution has given us greater visibility of the workload and has enabled us to more effectively deploy our resources to meet the priority needs of our customers. As a result, we have the right resource assigned to the right job at a significant cost savings to the customer," comments Craig Taylor, Supervisor, Resources and Scheduling for FortisAlberta.
ROI Benefits Achieved
FortisAlberta has achieved many significant benefits as a result of its initial implementation of a MWFM solution, including the following:
- A reduction in staff required for the efficient planning and organizing of work.
- A 30% increase in the volume of service orders completed from 2001 to 2004 with minimal increase of field technicians.
- Improved response time and fewer repeat visits to a customer’s site.
- Improved accuracy of customer information enabling more timely feedback to customers.
Thus, the implementation of MWFM solutions at both ATCO Gas and FortisAlberta has yielded significant benefits for both companies including improved operational efficiency for field service representatives and dispatchers. The MWFM solution in each case has allowed for better asset management and resource deployment decisions as well as improved visibility into the status of customer service orders. Furthermore, the MWFM solutions have proved to be a cost effective replacement of older legacy systems that were becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. Most importantly, the operational benefits achieved by both ATCO Gas and FortisAlberta have yielded significant improvements in service levels that have been passed on to customers.
About the Author
Simon Jacobs, Director, Product Management for MDSI, has 18 years of experience in software development, requirements analysis, and product management. Mr. Jacobs holds a Bachelors of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo and a Masters of Science in mathematics and computer science from the University of British Columbia
