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

Both Outlook and our AboutTime for Exchange Server product use free/busy time published by Microsoft Exchange to find available times in user’s calendars.  It’s great to be able to automatically find available time, but is the free/busy time published by Exchange always accurate?  If you are using Outlook 2007 or earlier with MS Exchange 2003 or earlier, the answer is “not all the time.”

Free/busy times in Exchange 2003 and earlier versions are created by having Outlook publish free/busy times to a special public folder.  By default, this information is published every fifteen minutes for the next two months.  In Outlook 2003, you can change these defaults by going into the Tools menu, selecting Options, clicking on the Calendar Options button, and then selecting Free/Busy Options.  You should see a dialog that looks like this:

You can increase the frequency that information is published and the number of months of free/busy information you want to publish.  Increasing either the frequency or the number of months, puts more load on the network and your Exchange servers, but increases the accuracy and availability of free/busy time.

There are other factors that can impact both the availability and the accuracy of Exchange free/busy time:

1. The special public folder is replicated to other Exchange servers at an interval defined by the Exchange system administrator.
2. The free/busy folder can get corrupted.
3. Outlook may be prevented from sending the free/busy messages (e.g., your VPN connection is not available).

In Exchange 2007, web services are used to get the free/busy data in real time.  Public folders are not used, so that issues with inaccurate free/busy data disappear.  For more information on Exchange free/busy time, see:

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/FreeBusy-Folders-Exchange-Server-2003-Depth.html

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

Scheduling in Enterprise

At eOptimize, we focus on automating the scheduling of people and resources in large enterprises.  What’s surprising is how entrenched the people scheduling problem is in enterprises. Scheduling often falls into one of these categories:

• Individual scheduling.  You need to schedule a meeting with two other people, so you start the email exchanges.  Five or ten email messages later you finally have a date and time to meet.  Did you keep track of the time those email messages took?  I didn’t think so.
• Outlook and Exchange scheduling.  You can use the scheduling tab in Outlook to schedule a meeting within your organization.  I’ve been an Outlook and Exchange user for a decade and it’s only since joining eOptimize that I’ve started learning how to use the scheduling tab. 
• Full time schedulers.  If enough people and resources need to be scheduled, there are full time schedulers.  These schedulers often have tools to provide views into multiple people’s calendars.  They visually scan these multiple calendars until they can find an opening and jam in an appointment.  This is often augmented with paper-based systems or a dozen or more Excel spreadsheets.  Not only do organizations have to pay for the full time people, the schedules they create often have gaps, reducing utilization of the people they are scheduling.
• Automated scheduling.  Inform an application of what needs to be done and get the application to automatically find a set of openings.  In simple cases, this is easy. Once you need multiple people, or each person needs additional resources, or you have to pick the person with the right skills the problem quickly becomes incredibly complex.  Our scheduling platforms solve this problem, providing automated scheduling answers in seconds, no matter how difficult the scheduling problem.

Despite the depth of the challenges in scheduling people, there is no job title that includes scheduling.  You cannot go to business school and learn people scheduling. There are few recognized experts in optimizing people scheduling.  In future posts, we will shine a light on the people scheduling problem and provide solutions for reducing the need for scheduling time.  At the same time, we’ll show how automated scheduling increases your people resource utilization.

David Greer