Master Service Lifecycle Management

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies magazine

For field service organizations to position themselves as a value provider within the enterprise and meet increasingly stringent customer expectations, automated scheduling and dispatching are a must. While an experienced dispatch team can manually schedule technicians using their own knowledge about customer requirements and drive times, as operations grow and staff move on or retire, trying to get technicians where they need to be in a timely fashion requires more than just institutional knowledge.

When gaming equipment provider Scientific Games shifted from a manual to an automated dispatch/scheduling and work order management solution, it did so not only to improve efficiency in the field, but also to help meet the strict arrival time requirements in its service level agreements (SLAs). The company has deployed a scheduling solution that readjusts technician schedules every 3 minutes, dynamically routing staff based on call priority, location, skill set, and other factors. Not only has the company improved its customer service levels, but it has also increased the number of calls each technician completes each day by nearly 70 percent.