Harnessing Data from Field Personnel for Competitive Advantage

1. Abstract
Workforce Management (WFM) systems generate a tremendous amount of valuable information. Both in terms of work results collected from the field force and measurements of workforce activities captured throughout the work process. This paper examines how business intelligence capabilities as a fundamental element of WFM ensures everyone in the enterprise—from senior executives to dispatchers—get the right information at the right time in the right format for decision-making. The objective of this paper is to:

Introduce the business value and capabilities of WFM (Section 2).
Describe how a business intelligence solution can leverage and complement the field data collected by a WFM system. (Section 3 and 4).
Outline several key performance indicators used for tactical adjustments or strategic corrections (Section 5).
Present the key benefits of using a WFM decision support system (Section 6).

2. Workforce Management
Companies are confronted on a daily basis with the difficult task of optimally assigning customer-initiated work requests to their workforces, dispatching the work to the field, managing the progress of the workforce against the workload, and responding to changing conditions. The efficient use of resources is a critical factor when the workforce represents a significant portion of the organization’s investment.

The enterprise workforce management framework solves these problems by delivering an integrated, operations-centric view of the mobile workforce and its workload. It increases business effectiveness by promoting operational efficiency in individual operating areas while taking advantage of opportunities to manage work across departmental boundaries. The result is:

Optimal assignment of work to workforce
On-line field access to enterprise data
Real-time feedback on work progress
Automated processes enforcing best practices
Enterprise view of overall work status and workforce performance.

The WFM framework encompasses several capabilities, each of which is described in the following subsections.

Scheduling
Scheduling is the efficient assignment of planned work to the best available resources. It determines the staff that should perform given jobs in a defined order at specified times on specific days. Scheduling ensures that technicians are where they are supposed to be with the proper equipment at the right time, thus eliminating multiple visits and improving customer service. Scheduling works within the bounds of workforce availability and defined workload to optimize the assignment of work according to modifiable optimization criteria based on client business goals and in response to resource and work order status changes in real-time.

Scheduling includes the ability to book appointments based on the appointment criteria (e.g., time, location and job type), organizational work practices (e.g., offered appointment windows) and the availability of resources in that location, at that time, with the appropriate skill set. Scheduling also includes the ability to assign orders to technicians. The assignment engine matches the business unit, priority, location, job type, appointment time (or early start/late finish window), and duration of orders with the business unit, location, available time, skills and equipment of resources. Different rules can also be defined to handle specific scenarios such as storm condition.