Dispatch it, track it, field it

Setting the Scene
Office based work management and scheduling systems provide the necessary strategic functionality to enable the planning, optimisation and scheduling of work and resources right up to the point of issue. However, for those systems to also provide this functionality in an operational timeframe – they need feedback from the field, in real time.

Three components are involved in the above statement:

1. Work Management Systems – a work process manager acting as a central conduit for managing all work, resources and related information. A functionally rich enterprise software product offering the business critical functionality needed to manage work from initiation through to completion.

2. Scheduling Systems – using constraint based scheduling techniques to automatically generate an optimal schedule. The scheduler takes information from the work management system – work available, crew availability, skills, performance factors and geographical preferences and creates a schedule based upon rules and constraints designed to meet the company’s business objectives.

3. Mobile Systems – a solution covering all of the task and data requirements of the field workforce, extending the office work management environment into the field. An office based Dispatcher issues scheduled work to mobile devices (hand held or laptop computers) via wired or wireless communications methods. Field workers are able to view their work, change the status of jobs and collect completion data whilst in the field.

Traditionally, workflow between the three components is triggered by a status change e.g. ready to schedule, scheduled – ready for issue etc. However, events that happen in the field can affect both current work and the planning of new work and without real time communication links and integration of the components these effects are difficult to manage and build into the schedule.

Traditional workflow centres around how much time is left before the job needs doing. This affects the choices available to planners and schedulers. Figure 1 demonstrates the traditional task timeline.

Figure 1 Task Timeline
Planning, by its very nature is based on a set of assumptions. The expected duration of a job is defined by the nature of the job itself and experience of how long jobs of this nature take to complete. In addition, availability of field workers is based on their planned availability possibly recorded days in advance of current work. However, when the day comes a field worker could be ill and unable to work, a job could take longer than planned because of interruptions from say, other utility work or inclement weather.

In most situations one could argue that by building in ‘spare time’ in the work schedule, the natural influences of the real world should not affect the field workers ability to complete most of the work allocated to them. However, this is not very efficient from a productivity stand point.