Last week southern England was brought to a standstill as hurricane-force winds and torrential rain battered the region with gusts of almost 100mph ripping up trees, causing flash flooding and leaving at least 220,000 homes without power.
There is a lot of pressure on field service organisations to respond to such disasters. Road-clearing crews and utility workers get dispatched as soon as the situation permits. Plumbers, electricians, construction workers and technicians are sent to the scene to reconnect services and rebuild damaged structures.
Telematics, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping, GPS and cellular communications have been playing an increasing role in guiding field service teams, tracking progress and assigning workers in the aftermath of extreme weather events where safety is a concern. Such technologies are becoming more sophisticated, offering new ways to be efficient and responsive.
Next-generation workforce management solutions leverage fleet management technology and GPS data to deliver real-time information about worker and vehicle locations and the progress of their work. They provide dynamic scheduling tools to optimise in-day and scheduled work, and performance analytics that help make on-the-spot resource deployment decisions as well as prepare for future events.
The technology provides dispatchers and managers full visibility into work in the field so they can better plan and track it. Centralised consoles and dynamic GIS maps offer real-time visibility on crew locations. A dispatcher knows exactly when workers arrive at a job, how long they spend there, and when they leave. So when an assignment is completed, the dispatcher can send the crew to the next task in a smarter, more efficient way.
As the workday progresses, managers and dispatchers receive a constant stream of information on GPS location coordinates and the amount of time spent on each assignment. If certain roads are impassable, dispatchers can plan alternative routes to avoid delays. Using fleet management, dispatchers can route drivers around roads shut by fallen trees or flooding. This helps optimise routing and worker productivity, while improving worker safety.
Beyond field situations, workforce management delivers analytics about the performance and responsiveness of each worker and team. Utilities can compile the data into reports for review to spot trends and the need for improvements. For instance, if crews took too long to arrive, managers can better plan standby crews for future situations.
Use of analytical data helps improve productivity, making it possible to complete more jobs per day, and helps control costs. For field service organisations, squeezing more jobs into one day in the aftermath of a disaster accelerates the resumption of operations, which helps to minimise lost revenue and bring employees back to work more quickly. It also creates goodwill among customers, who often get frustrated when service restoration takes too long, especially after a storm or strong winds.
Workforce management increases accountability as well, by collecting accurate, reliable information on field operations and associated costs. Managers are better equipped to make the right decisions regarding resource deployment during emergencies and on a daily basis. Beyond that, organisations that base decisions on accurate, meaningful information that reveals historical patterns, trends and metrics can respond more effectively to not only day-to-day tasks but to the next storm, flood, heat wave or blizzard.
Mark Forrest, general manager of Trimble Field Service Management.