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News: Articles:
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.
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