Time Rules Everything

# CREATE IT

Time Rules Everything

Think back to around the year 2000 and what it was like when the cable repair guy was scheduled to make a house call. He’d tell you that he’d show up sometime between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. – which was simply great, especially back in the days when working from home was a rare option. If you were lucky, sometime late in the afternoon he’d call to say he’s held up and his buddy is coming instead. When? Yeah, he’ll call and let you know. Experiences like this were the catalyst for innovation that’s straight out of a sci-fi movie. People@Work demonstrates the subtle charm of artificial intelligence.

In a nutshell, People@Work expedites and streamlines the work that service technicians perform in the field in an absolutely fundamental way. The application is based on knowing how long a specific technician will take on a certain job and artificial intelligence assessing this information. Herein lies the heart of the innovation.

Using AI, the application makes a realistic calculation of how much time the maintenance job will actually need, scans through the nearest open time slots, and offers these options to customers who then select an appointment that fits their own schedules. “The system holds the slot for the customer and the night before the service call, it reorganizes which technicians will make which calls. The most important thing is that the appointment is always on time,” Product Owner Martin Kuna describes the system’s vision.

The fact that your customers can always rely on the service appointments they choose is an exceptional asset. Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, which automatically optimizes technicians’ workload and monitors their schedule, can advance any maintenance service to a 21st century standard. The entire process is automated and managed by AI and divided into several phases. In phase one, the customer

Using AI in planning can significantly reduce how many trips are made, as experience deploying the system at a major telecommunications company in Slovakia has shown.

is assigned to a specific slot and a specific technician. During the overnight break in phase two, the system optimizes the suggested slots, selecting the best (the shortest) routes for each technician while also considering how much inventory they have in their mobile storage units.

“Route efficiency tends to be the first casualty in efforts to keep an appointment on time. The previous job runs long and if you don’t want to cancel, the dispatcher sends out whoever is available, even if that means longer travel time,” Kuna explains. Using AI in planning can significantly reduce how many trips are made, as experience deploying the system at a major telecommunications company in Slovakia has shown.“It also depends on the local geography and infrastructure. The number of trips fell by 10% in Slovakia, while this figure was much higher in the neighboring Czech Republic,” Kuna adds, noting that People@Work helped increase service technicians’ efficiency by a whopping 40%. This understandably also has a major influence on carbon footprint reduction.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, the road to service technician efficiency is as straight as an arrow. “In the beginning we had a team of more than a thousand technicians. But they were constantly running behind. Why? They divvied up their work in the morning, picking and choosing the jobs they wanted to take. They used a simple formula to calculate how long they’d spend on each job: ‘I’ve got four jobs? So I’ll spend two hours on each job,’” Kuna explains.

Wasteful? Too expensive? But without knowing the real amount of time needed for the service call it’s impossible to plan any other way. “The first surpluses appear when the technicians click in the system that the job is finished once they’re done,” Kuna says.

Two hours suddenly turn into forty minutes. “The number of staff technicians gradually fell to six hundred and finally settled at two hundred. Thanks to these savings, we were able to contract specialists. At the same time, this reduced team can handle a larger volume of work without any stress,” Kuna adds. Fewer trips and greater efficiency translate into considerable savings for the service company and a very positive impact overall. Thanks to AI, optimal route planning significantly reduces the negative impact on the environment. Fewer miles driven, less fuel consumed. It’s a simple equation that adds up by applying skills and technological expertise.

40%

is how much technicians’ efficiency grew. This understandably also has a major influence on carbon footprint reduction.