In field service, companies juggle a multitude of different tasks. These range from troubleshooting to maintenance tasks to new installations. Each of these tasks has its own relevance and requires different levels of urgency. How a company plans and prioritises these tasks can make a significant difference in terms of service efficiency and, most importantly, customer satisfaction.
Troubleshooting: The need for speed
When equipment fails or systems malfunction, troubleshooting comes to the forefront of priorities. Depending on the severity of the fault, a quick response can be crucial. Delays can not only hurt companies financially, but also affect trust and reputation with customers. In some cases, quick troubleshooting can mean the difference between a minor inconvenience and a major business disruption.
In the role as a service provider, it is important to consider the priority of the disruption from the customer’s point of view and to take this into account in the planning. Service levels are usually based on the severity of a disruption. The service provider must comply with them in order to avoid economic losses.
Maintenance tasks: Flexibility in scheduling
While troubleshooting requires urgency, maintenance tasks usually offer a little more leeway. These tasks, which are essential for the smooth operation of equipment and systems, can usually be planned well in advance. Unlike troubleshooting, which may require an immediate response, maintenance tasks can often be more easily postponed or rescheduled without causing immediate damage.
With eFLEXS, you can plan route-optimised tours in the field service fully automatically
This is where eFLEXS’ automatic scheduling comes into play. eFLEXS can repeatedly or continuously optimise the entire job programme within a workgroup. This allows eFLEXS to automatically schedule higher priority tasks at the earliest possible time. eFLEXS ensures that all tasks can be scheduled according to available capacity within their individually specified deadline windows and completed on time. Instead of manually squeezing urgent tasks into an existing schedule, eFLEXS fits and arranges tasks into the shortest possible routes while meeting all deadline requirements. Capacity bottlenecks become visible and can be compensated for in the ongoing optimisation. Higher-priority tasks are thus completed as quickly as possible, lower-priority tasks are pushed out but remain within their deadline window, so that they too are completed on time.
The automatic scheduling in eFLEXS, with its route optimisation feature, enables field service companies to stay agile and respond flexibly, meet deadlines and keep their operations running smoothly.
Talk to us – we’ll be happy to show you using your own data as an example.
