Optimize Your Mobile Techs
, January 9, 2007 -
When laundry service company Mac-Gray mobilized its field techs, it did not stop there. Mike Lento, VP of operations, had a dream of developing a mobile application for its staff that collect coins from the machines. “Each one of our 100 coin collectors must visit an average of 630 laundry facilities in a month, which is 20 workdays for us,” says Lento. “Each collector went about the route differently, and we were collecting money – but it wasn’t standardized or efficient.” Mac-Gray wanted to maintain a central database of the laundry rooms and their particulars (i.e. the best hours to collect), and it also wanted to implement a least-cost routing algorithm to create routes from each collectors’ house to the depots where they deliver money at the end of each day. “With collectors making approximately 30 stops each day, there was a big need for routing optimization,” says Lento. To do this, Mac-Gray turned to mobile application developer Vettro, which had created the application for the service company.
With Vettro’s guidance, Mac-Gray implemented the ArcLogistics Route application from ESRI. The application resides on the service company’s internal server and includes detailed street information from TeleAtlas. The service company input the addresses of all of its laundry facilities, as well as the number of collectors, and the routing application developed an optimized route for each worker, for each day. The routes are transferred to the Vettro server and then sent to the collectors via the Mac-Gray-named CollectorLinx application. As with the TechLinx app, the work the collectors do is verified with button pushes on their phones.
By applying GPS (global positioning system) technology or stored map-based routing optimization, you can’t help but improve efficiencies. Companies using this technology have improved productivity by more than 20% just by eliminating unnecessary driving. Additionally, think of the fuel costs you can save – an alluring thought given the current oil situation. Mac-Gray is currently running a pilot test of CollectorLinx with seven collectors. “We’re taking it slow because there is a risk of some push back from the users here,” says Lento. “Some of these employees have been collecting on their own routes for 20 years and aren’t keen to change. We’re now telling them the order and route to do the collection, and we’re also giving them a device they’ve never used.&rdquo The concept of service as a differentiator isn’t just marketing speak. More and more OEMs are treating their service centers as profit centers, according to results from the 2006 Chief Service Officer’s Summit held by research firm AberdeenGroup. There, 71% of best-in-class OEMs reported their service operations are managed as a profit center, deriving more than 20% of overall profits from service. Now, if you’re a service company, nearly all of your profits come from service – service is not only a differentiator, but your core competency, so you’d better be good at it. Aside from the skills of your technicians, being ‘good’ at service largely rests on your responsiveness to customer calls. Wireless technology and applications can help you with that, as one service company, Mac-Gray, found. By implementing a real-time, field service application, including automated dispatching, Mac-Gray was able to improve call resolution time 43% and increase the productivity of its techs by two calls per day.
Mac-Gray services and maintains 63,000 commercial laundry rooms in 24 branch operating locations across the country, including academic institutions, laundromats, hotels and motels, and military and government facilities. The company employs 250 field technicians in dedicated locations to service the rooms. Mac-Gray is alerted to a service need by the users of the laundry rooms, who, via signage in the laundry facility, know to call 1-800-Mac-Gray or go to www.macgray.com to report a broken machine. The user notes the machine number and the location of the laundry facility; the call or Web alert is received by a Mac-Gray’s customer service representative (CSR). The CSRs get any additional information and record the service call in the company’s Solomon field service database. Then, the service side takes over.
When Mac-Gray first wanted to implement a mobile field service solution, it had only 100 technicians in 10 locations, mainly in the northeastern United States. The technicians were supported by six dispatchers. The dispatchers accessed the company’s databases and viewed new service calls as recorded by the CSRs. Based on the technicians’ service areas, the dispatchers assigned calls to each tech. Mac-Gray’s problem lay in getting the calls and supporting information out to the techs.
MANUAL FIELD SERVICE DISPATCHING WASTES TIME
At the start and end of every day, the technicians would call the dispatchers to report the service calls they completed (i.e. closed) and the parts they used the previous day. The dispatcher would furiously write down the information and later input the data into the field service database. Then, the dispatcher would tell the field tech the calls that came in that needed to be addressed, and the tech would write down all of the information (e.g. location, machine number, owner/operator name). “The way we work, our techs always have calls to take care of – there’s a rolling queue – so they’re always driving,” says Mike Lento, VP of operations for Mac-Gray. “This means they were steering with their knees, with a cell phone wedged against their ears, trying to write down instructions. It wasn’t safe or efficient. Also, we try to show our customers that we’re servicing their rooms in a timely manner, and we do this through the time stamps of closed calls. However, since the tech calls in at the end of the day or the beginning of the next day, his remembrance of the time he closed the call – which the dispatcher records – is purely anecdotal.” This manual data collection method was prone to human error, especially regarding part numbers, which are 15 to 20 digits long. Most companies can attest to this: one transposed number and your inventory count is off, and you’ll be wasting time later to investigate why a technician used a part you thought he didn’t even have.
Mac-Gray knew something had to be done. “We wanted to eliminate the manual dispatch function, as well as find a way to close calls and possibly transact inventory, automatically,” says Lento. “We developed a wish list of things we’d like to incorporate into the solution.” The list Mac-Gray developed also included the need for technicians to carry one device that supported the eventual application, as well as provide two-way radio, voice, and text messaging communication methods. “I also had a dream of developing a mobile application for our 100 coin collectors, who drive around to all of the locations and collect coins on a monthly basis,” says Lento. “I knew mobilizing the techs needed to come first, but I wanted a solution that could accommodate this secondary need, too.” (See sidebar on p. 12.) Armed with the list of requirements, the service company’s field technology group began looking for a solution, largely relying on trade shows to investigate viable options.
After narrowing the field to several vendors, Mac-Gray sent out an RFP and eventually contracted with Vettro, a vendor of customizable mobile applications. “Our IT staff visited with Vettro and were very confident that the application could be appropriately customized to meet our needs,” says Lento. “Also, the device Vettro recommended, the Motorola i350 phone [now upgraded to the i605 smartphone], met all of our needs.” Vettro charged Mac-Gray $250,000 in up-front development costs for the two applications. Mac-Gray also pays a monthly per-seat fee to Vettro in addition to monthly voice and data charges for the Sprint Nextel network. “We figured that the combined monthly fees would be paid for each month if the technicians each saved just two hours per month,” says Lento. Vettro developed the application, customizing the workflow to reflect the way technicians’ calls work and minimizing the need for data input beyond button pushes. Vettro also implemented bar code scanning of parts used to minimize parts inventory errors and integrated the application with Mac-Gray’s Solomon database. To create automated dispatching, Mac-Gray evaluated its list of laundry room customers and assigned a primary technician to each one.
ENSURE MOBILE TECHS DON’T MISS NEW SERVICE CALLS
With the solution, which Mac-Gray named TechLinx, calls come into the service company the same way, but when the CSR tags a call as needing service, the information is automatically transferred to the Vettro application. Depending on where the call came from, the application knows which tech it should be assigned to and wirelessly transmits all of the information regarding the call and the account to the technician. “When new calls are sent to a technician, an annoying pop-up screen appears and won’t go away or allow the tech to do any other work on the device until the call is accepted,” says Lento. “That way, we can assure techs aren’t missing new calls.” The call is time stamped when the tech accepts it, and all accepted calls go into a queue. The techs complete each call in order of priority and/or the time they were received. Throughout each workday, techs update the TechLinx application (via button pushes) with the progress for each call: when they’re en route, when they’ve arrived, when they’ve finished, and the work that was done. Techs also are prompted with questions regarding inventory used, at which point they attach a bar code scanner and scan the parts used (the parts are bar coded). When a call is closed, it is automatically sent back through Vettro’s server and input into the field service database. Mac-Gray customers at a certain profile level receive an e-mail stating the call was closed.
After implementing the solution, Mac-Gray was able to eliminate all manual dispatching functions, which Lento figures enabled a payback of 18 to 24 months. The techs are able to close out 10 to 12 calls per day, an improvement over the previous 8 to 10. Call resolution has improved as well, from three and a half days to two. Also, since the TechLinx application was initially deployed, Mac-Gray has grown its business to 63,000 customers in 24 locations with 250 techs, still with no manual dispatch functions. “We probably would have needed 12 dispatchers to support 250 techs,” says Lento. “You can imagine those savings as a whole, and we’ve been able to quantify them to about an hour per day, per tech.”
Remember the “service-as-a-differentiator” concept? Mac-Gray was able to experience that firsthand after deploying TechLinx. “We were trying to win Boston College as a customer, which is a huge account,” says Lento. “We were pitching the mobile application to the director of student services, and I had the tech who would service the college come there and bring his phone running TechLinx. I told the director to log in a service call via our Web site. He did, and 30 seconds later, the technician received an alert for the call. The Boston College guy was blown away – and we got the account.”