Covad Communications Case Study

As the leading national broadband services provider of high-speed Internet and network access utilizing Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology, Covad Communications found that the biggest pressure points in managing their field service workforce were in maximizing productivity by increasing successful truck-rolls per technician per day, and maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction by being there at the time promised.

Before acquiring a Work Force Management/ Scheduling System, all of the field service calls were scheduled manually and later optimized manually as required by the field force. Key objectives, such as minimizing travel time, were accomplished by guestimation. This approach was not scalable and resulted in a dispatcher-to-technician ratio of about 1:7. They eventually replaced this manual system with an automated Work Force Management/ Scheduling System, which did not perform as expected. These problems led Covad to consider acquiring a new Work Force Management/Scheduling System to replace the existing one. By doing this, they hoped to significantly increase the level of scheduling automation as well as the quality of their daily schedules.

The vendor selection process was very detailed and highly visible to both executive staff and the user community. It was important to not only select a new scheduling vendor, but also to rebuild their users’ confidence in automated scheduling systems. The entire selection process took approximately four months to complete. Covad assembled two teams—one with technical experts and one with business users—from within the organization to evaluate and select the new scheduling system/ vendor.

The areas focused on included:

• Company – Including customer reference checks, number of years in the industry, number of existing customers, and number of development/support staff
• Functionality – Including product functionality as it related to Covad’s functional requirements, level of customization required to meet functional requirements, and any additional functionality that might be needed in the future
• Technical – Including scalability, system stability, API interface, and server and client performance
• Implementation – Including time-to-implement and structured implementation methodology

After screening many potential suppliers, most of whom had only limited scheduling logic, Covad decided to take a closer look at two specific vendors as well as the option of building in-house using third-party scheduling libraries. Covad then selected SERVICEPower for more detailed evaluation. Internally, one the biggest issues they had to deal with was that their user community and technical experts had limited confidence in automated scheduling systems because of the problems experienced with the first automated system. This was overcome in two ways:

1. The extensive vendor selection process required SERVICEPower to prove that their system would in fact do what they said it would.
2. SERVICEPower’s extensive implementation methodology included several interactive workshops that showed Covad how our product would address their specific scheduling issues.

Also, it was absolutely critical for them to have the selected Work Force Management/ Scheduling system interface reliably with existing applications. Scheduling is only one element in Covad’s Order Processing/Fulfillment system; the scheduling system must be fed by and feed back to the order processing systems. In addition, among other factors, the scheduling system had to solve the following business issues:

• Maximize technician productivity by maximizing truck-rolls per day
• Enforce date/time commitments to customers
• Scale easily as the volume of orders increases
• Allow for a high level of automated scheduling
  

ServicePower was finally selected because we not only met but far exceeded the market leader in the following areas, which were crucial to Covad’s business: scalability, stability, robustness of out-of-the-box features (no customizations were required for our application), and real-time optimization. In addition, our advanced implementation methodology, high level of ethics, and commitment to customer support played an important role.

In the implementation phase, Covad had several systems that needed to “talk” with the scheduling application, and they needed an interface that would address all communication requirements and be highly reliable in order to protect data integrity. ServicePower spent a significant about of time with Covad’s developers, helping them learn our APIs and developing a solid integration design.

Covad have significantly increased their level of automated scheduling since deployment. They are also optimizing schedules throughout the day and have received very positive feedback from their field managers. The following operational gains have been realized:

• Increasing dispatcher-to-technician ratio to 1:30 (minimum).
• Increasing jobs per day per technician by 7-10%
• Decreasing overall travel time by 15%

In summary, at Covad, the introduction of ServicePower has significantly increased the level of automated scheduling and optimization, increased system stability, and established a highly scalable environment. Covad also recently deployed a new Web Self-Service site that allows customers to reschedule their appointment times, an important factor in maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction.