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