Utilities Tech Outlook Weekly Brief
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Forecasting planned and unplanned project volume is essential for minimizing resource shortages, cancellations, and rescheduling, negatively impacting customer experiences and productivity.
FREMONT, CA: Accurate and reference data must be exact for automated schedules to be precise. Leading businesses validate their most crucial data. In work management systems, rigid limits, such as necessary technician credentials, sometimes render valid automated scheduling obsolete. Simultaneously, companies proliferate soft weighted limitations, such as due date or trip time prioritization. However, the leadership team converged on a simple, focused set of hard and soft constraints through concentrated design workshops, resulting in manifestly effective schedules.
Job durations: Without accurate information, automated scheduling systems assign unrealistic quantities of work to each worker, necessitating substantial manual adjustments. For example, 85 percent of all jobs were set to last 30 minutes at a utility that hadn't updated its data in more than four years. In order to develop more realistic plans, the organization conducted a historical review of job duration and began constantly updating data.
Job locations: Numerous positions have wrong or missing geographical locations to the extent that certain U.S.-based utilities appear to have jobs amid a body of water. Successful scheduling organizations guarantee that the system can group jobs by location and reduce travel time. If possible, they review addresses, match data in the GIS system, or flag and validate data through the scheduling solution.
Skills and qualifications: Competencies and qualifications Leaders in the industry assign responsibility for rectifying and routinely updating all crew information so that the system can match people with the appropriate skills and qualifications to the appropriate roles.
Job priorities: Frequently, work priorities are loosely based on SLAs linked with job kinds, customer types, or the number of required services. They lack comprehensive trade-offs. Job priorities must be consistent and reflective of relative significance to eliminate manual effort on the part of schedulers. For instance, if there are resource limits, an effective system can evaluate the trade-offs between high-priority work requiring extensive travel and three lower-priority jobs nearby.
Job volume: Forecasting planned and unplanned project volume is essential for minimizing resource shortages, cancellations, and rescheduling, negatively impacting customer experiences and productivity. At one European utility, unscheduled work frequently necessitated the rescheduling of scheduled work, frequently with less than 48 hours notice. When the organization shifts to data-driven forecasting of unscheduled jobs and resource planning, rescheduling is drastically reduced.
