Your planners have a daily challenge of co-ordinating service technicians, schedules and customer requirements in order to ensure machinery and equipment is serviced efficiently at your customer sites. At the same time, they need to ensure that their service schedules are optimised to meet contractual obligations and ensure cost and time efficiency gains for your business.
Firstly, the skill sets and the availability of the service technicians need to be carefully allocated to ensure the right technician is on the right job with the right tools. Planners need to maximise people utilisation in order to meet their KPIs; the less people on the bench the better and it’s important not to miss opportunities for maximum people usage.
Managing service scheduling also involves a great deal of time and distance co-ordination. So planners need a variety of tools to help them do this, such as geo-locations, geo-coding and mapping. Each site visit that takes place needs to be carefully planned, from the technician starting point, to the distance between one job and another, as well as the expected time to be spent at the customer site.
The workload definition is really important and for this the planner needs good quality data so they can assign the correct amount of time to each job and allocate the appropriate teams which may need to change during the course of a job.
Field service scheduling can be extremely busy and unpredictable as parameters can change daily and even hourly. Planners need the tools to operate their schedules on a very flexible and continually changing basis. Sometimes a service may be planned but the customer has become unavailable at the last minute, sometimes the technician may be unavailable, they may be ill or their vehicle may break down and so forth. Planners have to be able to constantly make changes as these eventualities occur.
So how can you achieve all this with easily and seamlessly?
Ready4 Advanced Scheduling is a powerful graphical work and resource tool that integrates seamlessly with your SAP system, whether in SAP ECC or SAP S/4HANA. It revolutionises the scheduling processes and optimises resources management.