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

Guest Blog Posting
By Gary Yurkovich

- the perception is price
- the reality is service

You lost a customer.  Why?  
The answer may surprise you.

According to a survey by Marketing Sherpa, vendors think that customers primarily leave because of price. However that same survey shows that the primary reason customers leave a vendor is due to Customer Service.

Customers and Vendors Disagree:

Source: Marketing Sherpa

The disparity underscores an essential point in this age of commoditization: superior customer service can bolster loyalty and provide a basis to charging a price premium.

Customer service is rapidly becoming the primary differentiator for organizations competing for marketplace success. Customers have increasing expectations of extraordinary service from their vendors and suppliers. Service differentiation is increasingly difficult when everyone is chanting “We are driven by customer service”. Customer loyalty is key and every call a customer makes is another opportunity to either impress them or lose them to a competitor. Driving their expectations is a convenience centered economy where consumers are highly valued and unaccustomed to waiting for answers.

Real time scheduling of customer service with firm dates and times is now expected as part of good customer service. This is easy to do when running a small dental practice, but very difficult to achieve in large global enterprises where thousands of people and resources must be coordinated. Advanced real time workforce scheduling platforms like those provided by eOptimize are designed to be integrated into larger enterprises and existing systems that can provide the tools to allow you to take customer service to the next level.

It’s easy for the sales person to say we lost the customer because of price. It’s hard for an organization to see that they are really losing customers because of poor customer service. Don’t let your existing systems and processes hold you back. There are solutions available today to enable the best in customer service scheduling. See our white paper Real Time Scheduling in Workforce Management to learn about the advantages of real time workforce scheduling over traditional scheduling.

Gary Yurkovich

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a hot topic over the last decade.  It should be as attracting and retaining customers is more challenging today than it ever has been.  In many organizations CRM sits at the heart of the enterprise, spanning marketing, sales, and service as noted in the diagram below:

When working with customers we find that there is continuous interaction between CRM and scheduling.  For example, when companies have a workflow that needs to be executed for every new customer, schedules have to be created.  In cases where people need to be scheduled in a coordinated workflow, providing scheduling answers is hard. 

For example, suppose that these steps have to be executed before a new customer can be setup:

1. One hour introductory meeting with an implementer.
2. After the introductory meeting, a project manager has to spend a half hour creating the project plan for the customer.
3. The account manager has to be scheduled to do a follow up call after the project manager has the plan.

In many companies this scheduling problem is solved by manual processes and numerous email messages back and forth between teams and the customer.  It is prone to all sorts of errors.  By automating this scheduling the customer experience completely changes:

1. They get the scheduling answers they need when they place their order.
2. Things are delivered when they said they would be.

This level of customer delivery is what people expect today.  Is your company making it easy and accurate for your customer’s first customer relationship with you to be an outstanding one?  With automated people and resource scheduling, you can.

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

Those of you with children may recall the book “The Little Engine That Could.”  The story is about how a little engine that is personified as someone who tries hard and succeeds, gets a train load of toys and food over the mountain for the children in the next town by repeating “I think I can, I think I can.”

While the analogy is a stretch, our scheduling engine is the core platform that let’s people perform on time.  Like “The Little Engine That Could”, our scheduling platform has the intelligence and scale to always get over the mountain of complex scheduling problems.

Rather than pull from the front of the train, we sit in the middle of all important IT systems, coordinating the complex information that let’s us automate individual schedules and workflow.  James Taylor at Smart (enough) Systems calls us an Enterprise Decision Management system. EDMs operate in real-time to make operational decisions for organizations from moment to moment.  The advantage of EDMs is that they are operating on up-to-date information, resulting in faster and better decisions.

In many organizations information silos make it difficult to automate decisions such as people’s schedules.  Calendar information is stored in MS Exchange.  For telecommunication companies, customer information is in their OSS or BSS. Provisioning inventory might be in another application.  Individual skills for engineers are in the HR database.  Because we are a service oriented architecture (SOA) web service, we can sit in between all of these applications.  By combining all of the data, we are able to make intelligent scheduling decisions faster and better than human beings can.

If a financial services call center is taking calls to book appointments for advisors to make customer visits across the US, we again have to deal with multiple information silos.  The customer application has the address, information we can use to compute travel times, physical location, and time zones.  Each advisor is licensed to operate in specific states, so the HR database needs to be interrogated to verify license information.  Individual calendars are stored in MS Exchange.  No individual call center person can keep all the variables straight in their head.  If there’s no automated solution, our experience is that there is an entire team of managers who take every request and then manually match all the information to find scheduling solutions.  Not only is this labor intensive, there are so many manual steps that it is error prone.

At eOptimize we have the enterprise decision management platform that can scale to take all these complex information silos and produce correct scheduling answers in real-time.  Our scheduling engine solves your people and resource scheduling challenges, just like “The Little Engine That Could.”

David Greer

One of the ways that companies keep customers happy is by doing what they say they would do when they said they would do it.  While simple in principle it is difficult to achieve this in practice.  Companies that focus on high customer retention and high revenue per customer look for ways to automate their interactions with their customers, front-line service people, and back office employees.  That’s were we come in.

People in companies can sometimes lose sight of the customer, which is nicely illustrated by the cartoon above (used with permission from Budd Life).  For telecommunication companies we take the complex process of activating new service activations and automate the scheduling of all of the people involved in the process.  What used to look like a multi-level flow chart with unending arrows and boxes now becomes a single step process.  It’s true that there is significant setup that has to be done initially (to map those arrows and boxes into our application), but after that everything is automatic.  When people see our AboutTime for Exchange Server product in action for the first time, there is often an amazed look on their faces and we here comments like “do you mean that we really can schedule the entire process all at once?”  To which we answer, “yes you can, that’s what we do.”

Financial service companies with large institutional 401(k) retirement plans face a challenge.  The employees of their institutional customers need to schedule time with a financial planner to review or ask questions about their 401(k) retirement plan with the company. Financial service companies would like for employees with their plans to be able to self-service appointment bookings through a customized web portal.  This is a complex problem.  You need to coordinate free/busy time, match the right skill set and knowledge of the individual retirement products, often across multiple time zones and geographies, with the individual financial advisors, who could number in the hundreds or thousands.

Once again, AboutTime for Exchange Server rises to the challenge.  Around the planet we automatically schedule such complex customer appointments every day. The customer is able to get the service they need, while we insure that the individual financial planner’s time is booked appropriately.  The customer gets the call when they expect it.  That’s what customer service should be.

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

What happens if you need to schedule multiple people in a business activity? To make things more challenging, what if you wanted to schedule multiple people in a multi-step process, drawing from pools of skilled people?  This is where automated scheduling can provide real benefits to organizations, producing much better human resource schedules, thus lowering costs.  At the same time, because we can schedule an entire business process, we help companies gain the capability to tell customers when events are going to take place in real time (e.g., when the customer is on the phone).

Telecommunication companies have a challenge when they are scheduling the activation of new services for their customers.  Consider activating a T1 data service (a high speed connection to the Internet that is often used by businesses).  To activate a T1 data service, there are multiple steps and people who must be scheduled.  Many telecommunication companies today solve this challenge by either using a group calendar where a fixed number of time slots are allocated to each time period in the day. Another way to schedule T1 activations is to put all open work orders in a queue and then have individuals involved in the process pull their next work activity from the top of the queue.

Both these solutions work, but they produce suboptimal schedules.  Group schedules often need a lot of manual intervention, taking up valuable management time.  Both methods require additional resources for forecasting and predicting peak loads.

Using our AboutTime for Exchange Server product, the entire T1 data service activation can be scheduled as a single group of activities.  If you created a list of possible schedules in our standard user interface, you would be offered choices that looked like:

Our user interface is showing the first two potential schedules that are available right now. We show a T1 Activation. It has five activities in the process. The first four activities are scheduling people out of four different pools of engineers. The SO Billing Update activity is always done by Brenda Peters. If you look closely, we’ve actually scheduled four different people in Option 1: Gary Robertson, Ralph Jenkins, Joe Budd, and Joanne Hiller.

The key here is that AboutTime for Exchange Server has only shown schedules where each person required in the process is available. Rather than group scheduling, we are scheduling the individuals. No matter what size enterprise you are, it’s the individual people in your organization that you need to schedule. Our scheduling platform is one of the few that solves this complicated scheduling challenge, by introducing workflow concepts that automatically takes every individual into account. It’s a different way of looking at scheduling, but one we think makes a lot of sense.

David Greer

Scheduling is a time consuming task.  To reduce the time needed to schedule, you can use Outlook and Microsoft Exchange.  For example, I needed to schedule a meeting today with Dave Harestad, eOptimize VP Products and Services.  We needed our small conference room and the projector. 

To automatically schedule our design meeting, I went into Outlook 2003 and created a new appointment.  I then selected the Scheduling tab which is near the top of the dialog. I next added Dave Harestad, Conference Room - Small, and the Projector (our system administrator had created the last two resources).  I entered 12:00 - 12:30 for the meeting time.  Next I clicked on the AutoPick Next >> button near the bottom of the dialog.  This is what it looked like:

On the bottom right you can see that Outlook automatically looked ahead and found the first time when all four people and resources were available, which happened to be 3:30 today.  Visually, you can see the vertical bar in white with green and red edges which are located in the 3:30 - 4:00 time period.

I’ve used Outlook for nearly a decade and it’s only since joining eOptimize that I discovered this useful feature of Outlook and Exchange for automating scheduling. How many other Outlook users have never used this feature?  I’m guessing that it’s quite a lot.

David Greer