ViryaNet Service Scheduler

Transcription

1 ViryaNet Service Scheduler As customers demand better service within tighter deadlines, it is imperative for organizations to improve the efficiency of their field service operations. ViryaNet Service Scheduler maximizes the productivity of your field resources, ensuring that the right person is sent to the right place, at the right time and with the right parts to improve customer satisfaction and increase revenue. Multiple truck rolls, inefficient routes, and delayed or misaligned technicians cost a substantial amount of money both in lost revenue and eroding customer loyalty. ViryaNet Service Scheduler is a proven and powerful scheduling, dispatch, appointment booking, and route optimization product that automatically schedules the right resources, at the right time based on criteria such as skills and experience, equipment and parts, service-level agreements, drive time, and availability. ViryaNet Service Scheduler optimizes your field engineers schedules, enabling you to deliver service efficiently, and resulting in improved customer satisfaction. Service Scheduler is available as a stand-alone scheduling solution as well as an integral component to ViryaNet Service Hub s industry packages. ViryaNet Service Scheduler includes published APIs, enabling rapid integration to a variety of applications. How It Works When a service call is received, ViryaNet Service Scheduler analyzes many system and user defined parameters, such as technician skill, availability, location, existing service level agreements, the technician s prior commitments, and travel time. Using a powerful heuristic algorithm, dynamic programming, and a mathematical approach, Service Scheduler determines, in real-time, the best technician for the job. ViryaNet Service Scheduler offers: Intelligent appointment scheduling that lets you offer customers, either via a call center or via self-service over the Web, reliable and cost-effective appointment windows. Street-level route optimization (based on detailed street maps) that provide true travel time and related costs. The ability to schedule simple short tasks or multi-stage jobs, requiring multiple resources with dependencies. The ability to ensure inventory, tools, vehicles and other assets required to complete a job are available for use. A powerful and unique approach to managing crews and subcontractors. Easy integration with existing systems that generate work orders. The ability to create environmental templates (e.g. storm situations) that can be invoked with the click of a mouse. With ViryaNet Service Scheduler, technicians can access their schedules via a web browser, wireless device, or voice portal. Technicians can also report their activities, including arrival and departure times, so scheduling information is always current. 1

2 Managing All Types of Scheduling Needs Taking into consideration criteria such as existing service level agreements, technician availability, and travel time, ViryaNet Service Scheduler finds the optimal resource for each service request. Service Scheduler can use one or a combination of methods to schedule appointments, based on your organization s needs. Dynamic Scheduling... uses the full power of the scheduling algorithms. It can easily be configured to run in an overnight batch, in real time for any order type(s), or as changes to the schedule occur. This ensures that your field resources are always highly utilized. Dynamic scheduling when used in conjunction with the optional street level routing, delivers the most optimal solution for your organization. Semi-Automatic Scheduling... enables a dispatcher to manually invoke the power of the full scheduling algorithm at any time on any number of outstanding tasks. This alternative balances systematic generation of an optimal solution with the personal knowledge and experience of your dispatchers. Semi-automatic scheduling can be used exclusively or with any other scheduling approach. Manual Scheduling... offers a dispatcher the ultimate in flexibility. It preserves dispatcher control, while ensuring business requirements, such as skills matching, are followed by a dispatcher. Map-Based Dispatching... provides dispatchers the ability to drag and drop tasks on the map, while preserving the integrity of your scheduling rules. Map-based dispatching lets you find the closest resources, using criteria such as availability, proximity, skill set, and capacity and graphically display the result on a map Using Service Scheduler, your dispatcher can manually assign/re-route orders through the use of various screens or manually drag and drop work orders on to the dispatch board, with assistance from Employee Finder query tools. Setting Up Service Scheduler Service Scheduler consists of a series of configurable constraints and rules that you can easily alter for different divisions or geographies. You can also easily add new rules. Constraints are the first level of filtering, and consist of such criteria as skills and geography. Rules, which include cost parameters, proximity, and other criteria, are then applied to select the most optimal technician. Service Scheduler runs against all work orders and resources, or groups of those, based on types, geography, or any other user-defined filtering. Optimizer Profile Screen ensures lowest-cost, most-profitable solution to scheduling. Booking Appointments Certain situations, with stringent service level agreements, require adherence to predefined obligations, and result in aligning or re-aligning resources. Other types of service orders emphasize accommodating customers wishes. With Service Scheduler, customers can book an appointment by speaking directly to a call center representative or, alternatively, visiting your web site to conduct self-service. Service Scheduler reviews capacity to ensure that you do not overbook. The powerful algorithms of Service Scheduler then match the appointment slot with the best resource, within the confines of the appointment window. Integrating with ViryaNet s own call logging and order entry capabilities or popular call center applications, Service Scheduler presents CSRs with an integrated screen that contains available time slots when interacting with the customer. Pop-up appointment window driven by available capacity. 2

3 Monitoring Work With Multiple Dispatch Board Views The dispatch board is a powerful web-based work area that allows dispatchers to manage all scheduling and dispatch assignments. With one-click updates, dispatchers can monitor and manually edit existing schedules, check for calls in jeopardy; update technicians profiles, availability, and calendars; view unscheduled calls; and track technicians locations and routes. The dispatch board is highly configurable. The dispatcher can select colors, fields, sort orders, and more to personalize the board for his needs. Service Scheduler presents different styles of the dispatch board, each with an unlimited number of views, to support your distinct business needs. Full lifecycle management of the status changes associated with work orders are viewable on any dispatch board. For example, an appointment jeopardy can be flagged to turn red in the Gantt View, while acknowledgement of an order by a subcontractor in the High-Volume Display can turn another, user-definable color. GANTT-Chart View... supports typical services orders, such as installation, break/fix, and preventative maintenance across one or more days. High-Volume Display... supports high-volume, short-duration tasks, such meter services and inspections (for example, 500 tasks per day per technician), as well as effective management of subcontractors. 3

4 Managing Technicians Profiles Service Scheduler lets you store and manage various profile information about each technician, including Individual calendar and varying shift patterns, allowing easy access to availability. Start and end work locations per day, used for optimized routing, and eliminating the need for zone constraints and geographic boundaries. Skill sets, which can be adjusted following education and experience advancement. Time zones, in order to accurately track, availability, and billing. Organizational details, for cost and reporting measurements. Such information can be stored either in ViryaNet s product or your Human Resource system and accessed from either system via packaged APIs. You can also set up technician groups for certain business situations. For example, during a storm situation, a pre-defined technician, including subcontractor, mix can be utilized, enabling rapid changeover to accommodate quickly changing environmental factors. User defined queries lets you segment and build dispatch-definable queries. User defined queries illustrates the dispatch board with capabilities to launch new queries. Monitoring Your Technician s Day At any time throughout the day, your dispatcher can inquire about the status of a technician. Employee icons denote connectivity and technician status (online, on break, arrived to site, etc.). Employee Task Tracker graphically displays job and technician location, also allowing for map-based dispatching. Employee profile screen illustrates resource type, including technician, crews, and associated skills and includes links to create calendars. Managing Multiple Regions and Shift Roll Ups Service Scheduler allows you to logically group your field force into geographic regions or divisions. Each dispatcher can manage a portfolio of regions or be responsible for a single area of technician coverage. You can also group your technicians in shift patterns, wherein evening shifts can roll up technicians from a broader geographic area under the watch of a single dispatcher. 4 In addition, Service Scheduler provides a set of tools to help your dispatcher stratify his resource pool. These queries can be used as one-time search vehicles or be saved as queries for future use. Map-based dispatching enables dispatchers to graphically drag-and-drop work orders to the closest technician.

5 Color-coded legends enable quick review of the day at a glance. One-click updates record status changes on behalf of the technician. Drill-down capability reviews call details and record new field activity on behalf of the technician. Multiple assignment and re-assignment vehicles ranging from drag-and drop, semi automatic, employee finder, map-based dispatching, and specific screens for assignment and re-assignment. Mapping and Routing Best Directions ViryaNet Service Scheduler finds the most efficient travel route for your technicians. You have the option of using street or zip code based routing. Service Scheduler provides a mapping interface that allows technicians and dispatchers to view driving directions, the location of field engineers current and next assignments, as well as recommended travel routes. Mapping information can be disseminated to the field in a variety of ways, including using ViryaNet s mobile applications. Assignment / reassignment allows you to schedule, cancel, and reassign current work orders into the future. Technician status screen provides up-to-date information, including Raymond s current connection and work order status. Comprehensive geo-coded employee route map shows optimal route as well as turn-by-turn directions. 5

6 Interacting With Parts Service Scheduler allows you to associate the required job tools and parts for each work order, whether interfacing to ViryaNet estock module or an existing logistics application. You can configure Service Scheduler to assign work orders only to those technicians who possess such equipment on their person or trucks. Alternatively, Service Scheduler can be used to remind the field engineer to retrieve the needed supplies from inventory or another truck. Simulating Future Work Service Scheduler lets planners schedule future dated work orders. These work orders are assigned and mapped for planning purposes. As the scheduled date appears, the work order status changes, and orders can be locked and dispatched to the appropriate technician or crew. Benefits of Service Scheduler Increased Revenue Increase resource productivity and utilization Optimize travel routes to allow technicians to visit more customers while spending less time on the road Reduced Costs Reduce overtime Eliminate penalties due to missed service level agreements Decrease time spent on manual scheduling Improve ratio of dispatchers to technicians Increased Customer Satisfaction Offer customer self-service so they can log calls and schedule appointments over the phone or via a web browser Develop accurate and realistic service schedules in real-time Set appointments with user-definable timeframes Select the best technician to get the job done right the first time Improved Operating Efficiency Apply consistent scheduling policies throughout your organization Centralize scheduling and dispatching operations Receive field activity reports in real-time Improve visibility of workload and capacity ViryaNet Headquarters 2 Willow Street Southborough, MA U.S.A. Toll Free: Tel: Fax: ViryaNet Israel Ltd. 8 HaMarpe Street Har Hotzvim P.O. Box Jerusalem Israel Tel: 972 (0) Fax: 972 (0) ViryaNet Japan Ltd. Kyouei Building, 3F Shiba Minato-ku Tokyo Japan Tel: Fax: ViryaNet Inc. All rights reserved.