How Dynamic Scheduling Software Empowers Field Service and Delivery Management

Field service management involves a lot of moving parts and is a complex affair. The success of field service delivery depends a lot on how well you orchestrate the scheduling part in the field service delivery chain. Juggling with multiple orders and customer preferences becomes a challenge in ensuring an efficient and productive field service run. Here is where an automated field service dispatch software can prove very useful.

Improving field technologies is what can help in driving more efficiency in field operations. According to Aberdeen research, at least 67% of field service managers are investing in technology. The focus is towards bringing in more automation that will simplify time-consuming manual scheduling processes and lead to efficient dispatch. Field service organizations are increasingly looking at creating a seamless, coordinated and real-time experience with the help of an automated scheduling and dispatch system.

Challenges Related to Scheduling in Field and Delivery

Some key challenges that influence scheduling and dispatch of field service activities are:

Which technician is nearest to the location?
Does he have the right skill for the task?
What are the SLAs involved?
Is the task a priority or can be assigned later?
Is it a high value customer or critical account?
What is the best route that the technician can opt for?
How do you schedule multiple orders for optimized results?
How are the technician schedules – are they working, on holiday, in training, at meetings, etc?

Given the complicated nature of scheduling field jobs which can run into multiples with the rise in on-demand deliveries, an automated field service dispatch software has now become a necessary investment. Earlier, with the delivery culture not very strong, technicians could manage with manual scheduling and a few phone calls. But today the landscape has drastically changed. Customers expect quicker deliveries, timely deliveries. Managing these changing delivery windows becomes rather difficult with manual scheduling.

How Dynamic Scheduling Helps

Empowered with technology, smart and automated scheduling offers a much efficient ecosystem to orchestrate field deliveries and field jobs with better efficiency. Smaller organizations may still make use of manual methods for scheduling and dispatch but when it comes to e-commerce giants, dynamic scheduling is the preferred and go-to tool. Automated scheduling tools can easily manage thousands of technicians, by using intelligent algorithms and workflows to distribute multiple tasks as well as provide real-time tracking. Dynamic scheduling is designed to take care of sequencing based on priority, skill and availability of the technician. No wonder it leads to better results and improved field performance.

Also read: How Dynamic Scheduling Software Empowers Field Service Management

Capabilities of an Intelligent Scheduling and Dispatch Software

An automated scheduling software system comes loaded with a variety of features that are aimed to optimize field service delivery.

Let us go in detail and understand some prominent capabilities of a dynamic scheduling tool:

1) Automated Job Sequencing and Allocation

This is perhaps the most important reason why organizations choose to go with an automated scheduling system. Manual scheduling is simply unable to cope up with the swell in field service delivery requests. Multiple orders, changes, rerouting, all this can only be done economically and efficiently with the help of an automated scheduling tool. Automation helps in scheduling the task to the right resource taking into account his skill, proximity, priority and availability to perform the task to fulfil the given SLA.

2) Route Optimization

Another great capability that an automated dispatch system offers is providing optimized route plans to the technicians. This imparts a lot of flexibility to your field allocation as you can accommodate ad hoc requests as well as provide the best routes to your field technicians to achieve maximum output in a given day. Further, it brings huge savings on cost, fuel and technician idle time.

3) Live Tracking

Manual scheduling can never provide an insight into where your field resource is at a given point in time. With automated scheduling, organizations can now track their field resources in real time. This transparency helps in planning better field runs as well as allows better customer engagement.

4) Dashboard and Reports

An automated scheduling tool provides a field service organization with an easy user interface to track and control the entire field service operations. What’s more – the tool provides a detailed report on the scheduling cycle, which helps in making certain important decisions on the fly. As well as, the scheduling dashboard provides important details like how many tasks completed, in how much time, what tasks are pending, the route taken, etc. These insights help in better planning of field runs.

5) Mobile Functionality

Did you know that even today 50% of field service organizations do not offer any mobile interface to their field teams? With mobile consumption steadily on the rise, it only makes sense to ensure that you provide your technicians with mobility edge in the field. This gives your field and delivery teams to be more agile to accommodate any changes and new updates on the fly. This greatly empowers the scheduling operations as there is greater transparency and visibility with regards to who is on the field, serving which customer and who is not. The mobile interface acts as a single point offering 360 degree view of the field operations.

Fueled by artificial intelligence, Dista scheduling and dispatch software helps you to schedule and dispatch the right field resource / technician with the right skills to the right job at the right location, and makes automatic adjustments if issues arise – all in real time.