BT’s ability to provide high quality service while achieving maximum productivity and low operational costs is vital to the company’s competitiveness and success. But traditional manual approaches to field service management worked directly against BT’s business requirement. Job allocation was inefficient, causing engineers to waste time - particularly in travel between jobs - and it was not possible to respond quickly to customers’ problems or to demands for new lines. Finally, the cost of the management operation was high.
However, the challenge of scheduling thousands of field engineers was significant. The complexity lay in the multiple requirements and objectives of workforce scheduling. At BT the range extends from residential telephone engineers to network switch experts. In addition, BT’s three basic operational areas also have distinct skills demands: business and residential customer access, national business communications and core network. And all of these need to be addressed in a geographical context because local knowledge is an invaluable asset in delivering high levels of productivity.
COO BT Wholesale
One of BT’s most important goals is to ensure skill utilisation of its engineers and to minimise redundant travel and waiting time. To achieve this, and to improve service quality, BT decided to take a completely automated approach to workforce scheduling.
Trimble Taskforce schedules field engineers’ activity using information captured directly from field support requests.
The key advantages of Taskforce are its ability to handle same day scheduling, to mix emergency work with planned maintenance, and to modify the schedule dynamically using information direct from the field.
Additionally, Taskforce manages job dependencies, ensuring that inter-related jobs are completed in the correct order to minimise waiting time. Finally it supports work controllers’ and engineers’ preferences to location and type of work, avoids allocating low level work to highly skilled individuals, and increases job satisfaction by ensuring, as far as possible, that engineers operate in their preferred area.
COO BT Wholesale
Since its introduction in 1994, Trimble Taskforce has repaid BT’s investment many times over through benefits worth £175 million per annum. Additionally, its deployment enabled BT to introduce new, highly competitive customer service initiatives. These included a five hour response commitment to business customers and nine hours to residential customers. Once the response commitments had been met without the need to increase staff, BT had the confidence to deliver further improvements. The ‘Today’s Fault Today’ pledge promises that any fault reported by a business customer before 1pm will be repaired in the same working day. This promise could not have been cost effective without Taskforce.
Finally, Taskforce supports ‘what if’ analysis. It supports operations managers in tactical and strategic resource planning by enabling them to assess the impact of major events - marketing campaigns, roadworks, adverse weather - and plan to meet them.
British Telecommunications (BT) is one of Europe’s leading providers of telecommunications services. Its principal activities include local, national and international telecommunications services, higher-value broadband and Internet products and services, along with IT solutions. In the UK, BT serves over 20 million corporate and residential customers as well as providing network services to other licensed operators.
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