Kingston

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Managing the mobile field force

The challenge

When Kingston Communications acquired a licence to extend their network to the whole of the UK, they needed to ensure that their field force management was at least as efficient as that of their competitors in this new market.

Kingston had a multi-skilled field force which dealt with both the repair of network faults and the installation of new equipment. Efficient scheduling of the field force was a very complex problem. Some jobs could be planned in advance, while others arose urgently, without warning. Some jobs could be done during the hours of darkness, while others needed daylight. Some required an appointment with the customer. Many customers had restricted site access times. Where customers had contractual Service Level Agreements (SLA), the SLA would have a bearing on the required fault response time. Work also needed to be scheduled taking full account of the field force's itineraries, travel time and stores visits.

Formerly, Kingston had addressed this difficult problem with a Dispatcher and a Whiteboard. Expansion of Kingston's operations, and new regulatory requirements meant that an automated solution was required.

Kingston came to IPL for that solution, because of our track record of developing business critical operations support systems.

The solution

IPL assigned a full time team of software specialists, with dedicated project management. The team began work by evaluating a number of implementation technologies in the light of their analysis of Kingston's requirements.

The team was able to recommend the use of software technology that was significantly cheaper than Kingston had anticipated, and which proved to be entirely appropriate to the task.

IPL developed the Field Management System (FMS), a 3-tier software solution based on 4GL, object oriented and RDBMS technologies. The FMS is widely distributed, over multiple servers, office client machines and mobile computing systems carried by the field force.

The FMS guides customer care representatives through a fault reception process, which ensures that as much diagnostic information as possible is acquired during the first contact. To assist with this, the FMS integrates with line testing equipment and with customer records databases. The FMS helps the representative to offer an appointment for a repair visit, based on knowledge of the planned field force staff availability, and then automatically passes the fault report on to the appropriate department for action.

The FMS also extracts installation requirements from the database of Kingston's customer care system (which itself has IPL software embedded in it).

The FMS dispatch function maintains a detailed model of the field force's location (from GPS trackers), status and planned work. It presents the engineers' known locations, together with dispatched and upcoming jobs, overlaid onto Ordnance Survey maps. Where an engineer's location becomes uncertain over a period of time, the FMS shows this by a gentle fading of the “engineer” icons.

Assignment of jobs to engineers can be done manually, automatically, or by a combination of the two.

The automatic scheduling function of FMS is remarkable. The number of possible schedules is immense, and far too large for an exhaustive check of every one. The FMS has to operate very advanced heuristics to ensure that all scheduling constraints are considered. The FMS first eliminates the solutions which would violate hard constraints such as safe working times. Then it searches the remaining solution space for the minimum cost solution. Kingston's managers can assign varying “costs” to all of the factors considered, tuning the FMS's choices to reflect Kingston's business priorities. The FMS finds the minimum cost solution using heuristics based on the principles of “hill climbing” and “simulated annealing”.

To support Kingston's management and its regulatory obligations, the FMS also produces detailed statistics on the operational performance of each individual and team involved.

The highlights

Working at IPL's purpose-built software development facility in Bath, the team had the first version of the FMS installed at Kingston and ready for operation within six months of starting work.

The FMS has seen continuous use for a number of years, and has become a critical part of Kingston's business systems. It has been very well received not only by Kingston's operational staff, but also by the IT department.