Swisscom has improved the efficiency of its field engineers by
standardising on
LogObject's
mLogistics scheduling and dispatching application running on
Motorola MC70 ruggedised portable computers.
Field engineer productivity has improved by about 10% and
dispatcher efficiency by around 20%, said Swisscom which is
Switzerland's biggest telco.
The old scheduling system worked out travel times simply based
on straight line distances between one job and another. As a
result, accurate scheduling depended on local knowledge of the
terrain, said Urs Basler, Swisscom's senior project manager.
Swisscom wanted to reduce that dependency and also took the
opportunity to standardise and automate much of the work order and
scheduling process across four business units, all of which used
different information systems ranging from paper to laptop PCs.
Swisscom worked with software firm LogObject, service provider
mobit, and Motorola. Swisscom trialled the mLogistics package on
mobile computers from HTC, BenQ, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, and Sony
Ericsson before settling on the Motorola MC70 with GPRS/EDGE, but
without Wlan capabilities.
All helpline calls go first to a call centre which tries to
resolve them. If that is not possible, field engineers receive
information about their job schedules, the materials needed and the
problem itself, as well as whatthe call centre has already done on
the MC70s in real-time.
The MC70s allow the engineers to time-stamp when they arrive at
a customer site, start and finish a job. This information is sent
back to Swisscom to aid scheduling for the rest of the day.
The mLogistics application learns from experience, said Basler.
"The dispatchers do not need such a good understanding of geography
and do not have to guess how long it will take engineers to travel
from one location to another.
"We also now have much more information about where our
engineers are, which job they are working on, and can provide them
with much more information about the job. This is improving
efficiency and productivity, and as a net result, our customer
relations," Basler said.