Ep: 33 Be a Front Runner in Field Service Planning

Exceed customer expectations in field service planning

Therese:             Welcome to our DELMIA Podcast, Global Operations on the Go. I'm your host, Therese Snow. Today we continue the conversation in our second podcast on how to stay ahead of the competition with field service planning now and in the ever-challenging future. In the last podcast, Twan Janssen and Bart Williamson explained what major changes are happening related to field service planning. Could you briefly, before we get started, introduce yourself and your area of expertise?

Meet our experts

Twan:                  Sure. Twan Janssen, consultant with Dassault Systèmes since 2004, concentrating, focusing on planning and scheduling in workforce and other areas.

Bart:                    Hi. My name is Bart Willemsen. I'm a supply chain business specialist at the supply chain optimization division in Ordina where we are working in the area of supply chain. For myself, I'm almost 25 years actively involved in the supply chain. My personal background is in industrial engineering, and I am mostly very passionate about how I can help customers in improving their business results, mostly with better supply chain planning and optimization.

Therese:             Alright, perfect. Well, welcome back gentlemen, and thank you for the introductions. We discussed four major changes, which are demographic changes, social sustainability, the growing need for resiliency, and customers are more demanding than ever before. There's also an urgency to continuously exceed customer expectations. In this second podcast, we're going to focus on the third and fourth mentions. Can you please explain why resiliency is also required in field service planning?

Resiliency in planning

Twan:                  We talked in podcast one a bit about how planning is different from maybe five or 10 years ago, and resiliency as, I suppose also an example of that. There's a lot of stuff in the news about how things unexpectedly go wrong or go different. A lot of companies are suffering from supply chain challenges where the predictable supply was always there and now all of a sudden that is no longer the case and that has an effect on how you can run your business. So as we look at it from a more abstract perspective, it's yet another short-term change that you have to deal with in your plans. In order to still deliver to your customers on time--and this may be less for field service planning--more for other industries; If you don't get enough supplies for your factories, then you still need to figure out how do we deal with that.

Twan:                  What do we prioritize? What is the best approach for our factory to remain profitable? So it's, again, an element of you get short-term changes, you have to deal with a lot of information to build a new plan. There are a lot of rules you have to take into account and that adds to complexity, but in a context of shorter timelines to solve the problems. Whereas in, let's say in the past, if you could call it like that, you often have a relatively long time to create a plan and make sure it's in good shape. In modern times, that is no longer the case. You get short-term changes, you have to respond really quickly. And if you don't, it could lead to, again, in the context of field service, unhappy customers, customers may look for other suppliers. So if you don't have your plans under control indirectly, you could lose customers because of bad customer service. And that is something that obviously you want to avoid. Oh,

Therese:             Absolutely. And so moving on as well, about the fourth big change that was mentioned, the need to continuously exceed customer expectations bar, can you elaborate on that please?

The “Amazon” effect

Bart:                    Okay. Then I want to say something about the urgency to exceed the customer's expectations while the people are getting more and more demanding. This is related to the so-called Amazon effect. When you buy personally something online at a web shop, for example from Amazon, you expect the product to be delivered at the time and place as agreed and ideally no cost for the shipment. These high expectations are now also applying to the business-to-business world, and that also where you need to take care of that increased demand from the customer side. Services levels are getting tighter and tighter and customer service is more important than ever before. This makes it also to meet the customers as planning for the field service is also inevitable.

Therese:             Thank you, Bart. Twan, could you please mention some examples of implications for the planner?

Twan:                  The examples that Bart just described are a bit short term, things that are changing and keeping customers happy in the things you do is where it starts. One of the effects for the planner is that you do not want to be in a kind of reactive mode with your plans, but you want to prepare and ensure that the plans you create for next month are, in principle, capable of dealing with any disruption that you could reasonably expect. Not each individual one, but you want to make sure that for the next, let's say, planning horizon or planning period as you would call it, that you have the right number of people with the right number of skills so that you can deal with the workload that you can see happening. So often getting stuff right today is not solved today, but it's solved a few weeks earlier when you created the initial plans for today. So that's one aspect that you would like to see in a system, in a planning system that it helps you create plans in advance. But again, taking into account all the complexities of the right people in the right place with the tools and equipment that they need to bring so that you have as a basis a good fun for a plan going forward.

Twan:                  The other thing, if you talk about customer service and expectations, traditionally, often what you see is that if a new change comes in or if a customer comes in with a new requirement and people or planners deal with them one at a time and look at them in isolation. And I think what you also want to do is avoid that you solve a problem for one customer and as a consequence have a negative effect for another customer that you don't really see. The planner should also be able to adjust the plans based on new information in such a way that you do not overlook any negative consequences in other places of the plan. You want to have more of a global view and each time you make a change to the plan, for example, prioritize a certain work order or add a new visit because a customer has an equipment failure, you want to see what that means for other customers and deal with those changes and make a plan that solves your new problem, but at the same time minimizes or avoids consequences that you don't like for other customers.

Making changes quickly when circumstances change

Twan:                  That full visibility of what you're actually doing is also an aspect of what the planner would like to have in these kinds of circumstances. And then of course, responsiveness. So again, we talked about this before, you need to deal with a lot of information and rules and complexities. So a planner would also need to have a capability of when a change is made to very quickly see what it means and not have to calculate or ask other people or figure out what it means. But, you would expect from a planning solution that if a planner decides on a change somewhere, that the system can tell you what the effects are going to be so that the planner can decide based on that information, was this a good choice or should I try something different? These are the kind of capabilities you expect and the things that the planner would need in order to deal with those challenges that are facing them.

Bart:                    To add on what to just mentioned, of course planners should also be able to deliver services in the most efficient and effective way, in other words, at the lowest operating costs. So some examples of key performance indicators for better planning are minimizing the over-capacity resources like backup or standby employees. Avoid idle time between work orders by combining tasks more intelligently, reduce travel time by incorporating also route planning capabilities and increase first time right rate for better utilization of the multi resources.

Therese:             Those are certainly good examples. Thank you, Bart. So, I understood that the F SS P solution is based on the DELMIA Quintiq Workforce Planner. Twan, can you briefly explain how a workforce planner helps to support the planner?

Twan:                  Of course. So again, workforce planner is the basis of the field service multi-resource planning solution, and it contributes the, let's say, the general capabilities of workforce planning. There's obviously many benefits, but maybe highlighting five that are in particular relevant for the discussion of today. Bar just talked about KPIs and measuring the plan. That's one element. Workforce planner will provide the user with immediate feedback on the quality of a decision. It would measure if you make a change to the plan, what does that mean for the utilization of a resource. What does it mean for the, let's say the amount of overtime that you create or whether or not you violate rules in terms of labor rules or agreements with customers. What does that mean? Each time that the planner makes a decision in the system, there's instant feedback. Was it a good choice? Was it a bad choice or should I change something?

 

Utilizing smart visualization

Twan:                  The second aspect is what you could call smart visualization. If you look at a plan, typically a plan is often a sequence of activities or shifts that are assigned to people and those are the things that you would in the end also communicate with your employees. However, there are a lot of hidden information in these things, and that is what a workforce planner solution will also present to the user. So if there are elements of the plan where you may be able to introduce an improvement, the system will highlight those. If you have a rule violation somewhere, for example, too many working days in a row or too many working hours in a week, the system will also clearly indicate visually where that problem is introduced or which shift is causing the problem or which activity is introducing this problem. What does that mean? A planner will no longer have to search for problems. That's often traditionally where people spend a lot of time checking out that the planner is okay. But what workforce planner will do is it'll clearly highlight where those problems are so that the user can concentrate on solving the problem and basically add in value by introducing the right solutions rather than searching for the problems or making sure everything is correct.

Solve problems easier with long-term planning

Twan:                  The third aspect, we talked earlier about long-term planning and how you can solve problems of today in the plan you create much earlier. Workforce planner is a solution that covers the entire planning horizon. So it actually starts with input it'll get from other systems. So often workforce planner would be integrated with an external system where the actual work orders are managed for an organization. So that also means if a customer would raise a new work order or makes a change, this work order will then be made available inside workforce planner. And what that means is that there is an end-to-end, let's say transparency of the information as a single version of the truth. And there is no longer the problem of having to look in other systems or open up an Excel file to get the latest information. That information will be sent to workforce planner immediately, but also the effects of that will then immediately be, let's say, calculated by workforce planner so that the planner, again, using that visualization I mentioned before, can see, hey, I have two new work orders.

Twan:                  Do they fit? Do they cause conflicts with other work? How can I solve them? So that is again, a way of ensuring that all the information is in one place and that the users can make their decisions based on the latest information rather than the Excel sheet from a week ago, let's say. That's what the smart interfacing and the end-to-end planning will support. Fourth aspect optimization in workforce planner, a user can make plans and make decisions about plans, let's say by hand or manually, as we often call it. You can then make planning changes one at a time, but also there is optimization capability that can create complete plans or can adjust plans using algorithms, smart algorithms that essentially would do the same as the user would do, but of course can do it a lot quicker and therefore is able to produce plans or changes to plans rather quickly, but still take into account all the KPIs and the goals that the user and the organization has in mind.

Twan:                  And that means often traditionally, a planner will just solve a problem to ensure that the business can continue with an optimizer because things can go much quicker. You can not only solve a problem in the plan, but you can actually make a better plan at the same time by finding a good and a better solution using such optimizers. And then finally, and this is more applicable I suppose, to long-term planning when you have a bit more time, but there is no such thing as the plan. There's no such thing as the best plan. So workforce planner also supports planners in creating scenarios and figuring out, hey, what is the best plan under these circumstances? Or what if I have in the winter, maybe more illness, what would that mean with my planning? Can I make a plan that takes into account a little bit lower staffing levels or what would the plan look like in cases of higher customer demand? So you can make scenarios, create what if scenarios, and then evaluate them and basically choose the best plan for a particular circumstance as the basis for the work going forward. So these are just again, the five key examples of how it would apply to field service planning when it comes to workforce planner benefits.

Implementing solutions based on the number of employees

Therese:             Yep. No, that's great. Thank you. And I'm especially keying in on the what if scenarios. I think that's also something that we consider daily, so thank you. In this previous podcast it was mentioned that the solutions offered as a managed service that scales, for example, based on the number of employees. Can you tell me a little bit about the implementation of the solution? Bart,

Bart:                    As mentioned before, F S P M R is a commercial of the shelf solution that includes all the rich functionality of a best of breed multi resource planning solution. The template solution is ready to go with a minimal impact on the implementation effort. It starts with loading the customer data into the template solution where after a quick gap analysis is done and based on the outcome of that gap analysis, small but relevant customer specific functionalities can be configured and added. And also integration with key customer systems can be realized all in all the time to market will be minimal. Often this only a couple of months, the recurring cost scale with the usage based on the number of employees and specific requested customer care services on demand of the clients. So that also includes training and support. All

Therese:             That sounds great. Thank you. And so last question, what is the main takeaway would you say for the audience

Bart:                    Within the targeted industries? F S P will support planners optimally in creating the best possible multi resource plan in line with the company's strategy in terms of minimizing cost to serve, exceeding the customer expectations and the best possible employee retention.

Conclusion

Therese:             Thank you Bart and Twan for taking the time to speak with me today.

Bart:                    Thanks for listening to this podcast. I hope it made sense to you. I'm really looking forward to enter into a dialogue to see if and how we can add value in your specific planning case.

Twan:                  Also from my side, it was a pleasure to do this and hopefully the listeners have enjoyed our discussion. I'm looking forward to discuss more with them.

Therese:             Absolutely. I'm sure they have. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. I'm your host  Therese Snow, and you've been listening to Global Operations on the go.