Telecommunication companies, utilities, and many other organizations that schedule large field organizations often use the concept of bucket scheduling (also known as slot or group scheduling).  The basic idea is that you schedule service work (new services, preventative maintenance, emergency repairs, and so on) in big buckets of time. Each bucket is assigned for a geographic area (say NE, SE, NW, and SW). 

For any given day an estimate is made of how many slots will be made available in each geographic area. Suppose that work takes one hour on average, travel time is one hour, and there are ten workers in each geographic area. Assuming an eight hour work day, that means there are forty appointments available on any given day (each appointment takes two hours, one to do the work, and one for travel time, so four per day).

In the bucket scheme work is assigned to each bucket until it’s full. On the day of service a manager has to match up the individual technicians who are available with the work that’s been assigned to the bucket. In my posting on ROI on Automated Scheduling I’ve written about how expensive the “day of” scheduling is.

One challenge of bucket scheduling is that you cannot confirm a fixed time when someone will show up for a customer. Often the best that can be done is morning or afternoon. Real time scheduling solutions like ours schedules each individual technician at the time that an order is booked. This means that customers can be given a fixed date and time when someone will show up to do service work providing a better customer experience.

While the advantages of real time scheduling can be demonstrated, many service organizations find it challenging to move from bucket scheduling to real time scheduling. In order to do real time scheduling, the schedules of each individual technician must be established ahead of time.  This requires more planning and a change to the business processes of the organization. Changing business processes requires people to think in new ways. 

Our scheduling platform is designed to adapt to an organizations existing workflow, but we still have to help our prospects make the leap from letting people schedule the individual technicians to letting software do it automatically. The benefits of real time scheduling have been demonstrated in the marketplace. Rather than use buckets for scheduling, I’d prefer to use them for a fun day at the beach.

David Greer

We’ve written about how expensive scheduling can be for an organization. What often gets lost in the discussion is the amount of the customer’s time that can be wasted by poor scheduling.

When dealing with Fortune 500 clients, we are amazed at the staggering amount of lost time that organizations cost their customers.  We know of a large financial services company that manually schedules time for their financial advisors to provide education to the employees of their corporate clients.  For just one of their corporate clients, the call center took 17,500 calls to schedule an appointment with an advisor in 2007.  The average length of each call was 12 minutes.  That works out to 438 days.  If we assume approximately 200 working days a year, that’s more than two people’s full-time effort for a year.

Imagine what the client of our financial services firm would feel about wasting two people-years worth of their employees’ time just to schedule appointments with an advisor. With our software, the employees of the corporate client could self-schedule their appointments through a customer web portal.  Since we provide solutions in seconds, employees could schedule themselves in under a minute (even with login time and multiple choices for dates and times). If I was one of those employees, I’d like to have that time back so that I could spend more time on the beach with my family.

David Greer

We are constantly amazed at the hidden costs that organizations spend on scheduling.  Rather than automate their scheduling with software platforms such as our About Time for Exchange Server, organizations defer scheduling to line managers.  It’s like being in a sailboat and constantly trying to fight your way into the wind. Thousands of managers around the world do it every day.

Many telecommunication and utility companies use the concept of bucket or slot scheduling.  They allocate so many “buckets” or “time slots” in each geographic region.  Work orders are assigned to each “bucket” or “time slot” until it is full for a given day.  It is common for the time period to be a half day, thus customers can only be told that someone will show up in the morning or the afternoon.

Ignoring the lack of customer service in this approach, consider what happens each day.  Every morning the manager in each region has to do the final scheduling, assigning the work from each “bucket” or “time slot” to individual technicians. A mid-sized telecommunications company with offices throughout the US might have a thousand field service technicians and back office engineers who have to be scheduled every day.  If we assume twenty people being scheduled per manager, there would be fifty managers.  If they each take twenty minutes to do the scheduling, that’s 2,500 minutes or almost 42 hours of management time per day.

While automated scheduling will not eliminate all this management time, it can eliminate 70-80% of it.  Because each individual technician is scheduled ahead of time, managers can focus on exceptions.  These range from someone calling in sick to emergency break and repair issues.  The net result is management being more focused on customer service and less on day-to-day operations.  As a bonus, customers are told a precise time when a technician will show up, rather than having to wait around for an entire morning or afternoon.  Automated scheduling let’s you go with the wind, giving you and your customers a smooth ride to scheduling answers.

David Greer

Scheduling of people is often a hidden cost in an organization.  The scheduling function is pushed down the management chain or delegated to regional offices.  Because there have been few solutions to automated scheduling, managers have just accepted the cost of scheduling people as a cost of doing business.

Our customers realize cost savings in two ways:

1. By repurposing full-time scheduling people
2. By improving the schedules of the people being scheduled

For example, our customers have realized a 20% savings in the number of full-time people doing the scheduling.  Let’s assume that full-time scheduler costs $70,000/year (all prices are in US dollars). If we further assume that are an average of one scheduling person for every fifteen people being scheduled (which is typical) and you are scheduling 150 people.  By using an automated scheduling solution you would realize a cost savings of $140,000 per year.

A second advantage of automated scheduling is that it can make the schedules of the people being scheduled tighter. The result is better utilization of the people resources you are scheduling.  Obtaining accurate percentages of before and after schedules is challenging, but anecdotal evidence suggests increases from 2-10%.  If we assume that the 150 people we were scheduling in the example above are paid an average of $100,000/year and only a 2% productivity increase, that’s still a cost savings of $300,000/year.

Below is a screen shot of our ROI Calculator showing the examples we’ve just described showing a total cost savings of $400,000 per year:

Three of the major markets we serve are telecommunications, healthcare, and financial services and insurance. Do these numbers make sense?  For telecommunication companies, we automate the scheduling of service activations.  This includes the field service engineers, network engineers, network operation managers, and account managers.  All of these people are highly trained, so our assumption of all-in costs of $100,000 per person per year is reasonable.  Tighter schedules for service activations lowers costs by doing more service activations per person deployed in the process.

In healthcare, we schedule even bigger teams of people.  They are more highly trained and paid, so our ROI numbers are on the low side.  There are additional savings in healthcare, because we also automate the scheduling of expensive clinical equipment, from rooms to specialized testing devices. By making better use of people and other resources, we are able to help clinics see more patients.  In the US environment, this increases revenue for the clinics.

For financial services and insurance companies, we automate the scheduling of national sales teams.  Due to the complexity of today’s financial products and regulations around the sale of both financial and insurance products, these sales individuals are highly trained and specialized.  An individual sales person will cost at least $100,000 a year.  Improving the scheduling of customer appointments (either by telephone or in person) means that each sales person spends more time with clients and prospects. There is a cost savings and there is real potential for increased revenue.

Automated people scheduling is a highly effective way to realize cost savings and productivity gains.  Do you know what it’s costing your company to schedule your people?

David Greer