Dynamic Resource Scheduling and Mobile Working
Changing working practices and culture to become truly flexible means every customer can be treated personally. The most appropriate course of action can be adopted, because other commitments can be reallocated and rescheduled.
Dynamic scheduling underpins this new culture and makes flexible mobile working a reality. Organisations that have fully embraced these changes are experiencing levels of customer satisfaction beyond anything that had been envisaged and levels of productivity that they didn't even realise could be possible.
The solution has been designed to provide an Enterprise-wide Mobile Data platform which allows for future expansion with direct relevance to Social Housing, Environmental Health, Building Control, Social Care, and Highways.
At the highest level, real-time scheduling will deliver a multitude of operation benefits which are further supported and enhanced by the use of integrated mobile working. These benefits can be summarised as:
- Ability to make 'smart' appointments
- Support flexible working to ensure appointments are kept
- Customer messaging
- Mobile updating from operatives
Most notably, flexible working and mobile updating will result in a highly efficient mobile workforce able to meet fixed appointment commitments. Results to date have shown that the efficiency gain may save on the number of operatives necessary to complete the work as, through the efficiency gains, more work will be completed in a given period.
SunGard's solution immediately exposes the current workload in relation to the workforce, harnesses the benefits of mobilising the workforce and allowing real-time scheduling coupled with real-time acceptance and completion of assigned work.
SunGard understands the goals for the implementation of Dynamic Resource Scheduling and Mobile Working within an organisation and how to best achieve them. In essence these are:
- To meet the requirement for timed appointments
- Enable work force to spend more time in the field carrying out front line activities
- Spend less time processing back end administration
- Full automation into backend systems is integral to this technology
- Easy to use front end application
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Improve responsiveness and become more dynamic
- Provide a platform for future growth and complexity across the entire organisation.
- A platform based upon users being out in the field 24/7 365
- Identify trends and patterns in performance, bottle necks and better use of resources
This solution is based on the OPTI-TIME solution supplied by Xmbrace as the real-time resource scheduling system integrated with a mobile gateway and application suite designed using Integral mForms™ supplied via Integral Mobile Data (IMD).
OPTI-TIME is an automated workforce scheduling system, providing a comprehensive solution to the challenge of delivering an appointment-led housing repairs service.
OPTI-TIME holds the diaries for the trade operatives engaged in both responsive and planned maintenance, including emergency and voids teams as well as supervisor or inspector visits to pre or post-inspection work. Each resource has a usage profile, which typically incorporates skills, particular capabilities or exclusions and team designations (either functional, e.g. emergency team, or area).
SunGard's mobile application has been designed using framework technology from IMD. This technology provides secure and robust communications for mobile devices using a combination of communication technologies, GPRS in this case. Unlike other mobile working solutions, this framework provides an expansion capability to support and deploy multiple applications to a mix of mobile devices.
In this way, multiple departments may come online, using their own applications but using the same mobile gateway and communications infrastructure. This effectively reduces the cost of further mobile working initiatives as the organisation deploys them.