This seems simple but in this case a powerful optimisation could improve your productivity by 15% to 25%, frees up significant back office staff and increases customer engagement and satisfaction.

A real scheduling system should automate this process. It must have the capacity to automatically find who is the most cost efficient technician for a task when the job is initially scheduled but also all along the task lifecycle to keep the diaries optimal, all controlled by your rules and based on real time capacity.

A real scheduling system will automate the placement of jobs into the most cost efficient place in the correct operative routes, allow customer services staff to simply select an appointment window or even support a true self-service process. The true scheduler will continue to optimise the jobs without compromising customer promises or SLA's.

Travel is an important component for optimisation but some systems use this alone to optimise routes. However your organisation has a number of other costs to consider when deciding whether or not to assign a job, such as SLA penalties, shift costs, overtime costs, reputation costs – being able to consider these when scheduling means you maximise the efficiencies and hit customer targets.

Making the right appointment for you and your customers at the first point of contact is crucial. If your scheduler needs to run its optimisation overnight, manually, or has no optimisation at all you are giving an ‘inaccurate’ appointment. This can lead to missed appointments, cost inefficiency, overloaded diaries and jobs being moved out of the diaries.

Are your appointments being missed? Does your scheduler move and reject appointments without your input? – This is because your scheduler isn’t optimising at the point of making the appointment. This gives you an inaccurate schedule for that day and your scheduler tries to unsuccessfully reoptimise and potentially ignore your promises to your customers.

To truly get efficiency you need to make sure you are optimising at the right time, this needs to be when you make a booking, when you make a change, cancel a job, overnight, in the background – in other words in real time and all the time.

Does your scheduler only optimise one operative diary for one day? This gives you a poor solution across your organisation. To truly gain efficiency across all your resources you must have global optimisation which looks at all possible resources across multiple shifts and days. global optimisation can increase your efficiency over simple route planning by an additional 5-15%.

Many solutions will state they are a cloud solution, however many scheduling solution are really just being hosted for you, this gives you the benefit of not having to manage the infrastructure but is of no benefit in terms of how the scheduling solution is architected to utilise the power of the true cloud, including scalability and resilience.

There are huge benefits of being a true cloud solution, from scalability and resilience through to easier upgrade processes and monitoring. For a scheduling system the true cloud doesn’t put any limitations on your organisation. Every piece of the architecture is native to the true cloud, to be scalable, resilient and will grow in line with your business needs.

With a true cloud solution upgrades are seamlessly applied frequently, and automatically therefore removing the need for detailed and expensive upgrade projects, that require costly external consultancy and take up precious internal resources. Upgrades are delivered securely and progressively with minimum risk and permanent monitoring in place for peace of mind.

True Cloud solutions are far more cost efficient as resources are being utilised across the cloud as needed, ensuring your business always has the capacity it needs but isn’t paying for expensive infrastructure that you aren’t utilising giving you better value for money.

True cloud solutions give you little risk of downtime, each component is built using native cloud technology with greater resilience, redundancy and flexibility. Seamless upgrades are completed without the need for any downtime or out of hours working for your staff. This gives you more confidence your systems will be always available when you need them.

True cloud solutions are updated frequently with the very latest security updates ensuring they are not vulnerable to cyber-attack. Data is partitioned to remove any risk of data being viewed or mixed with other organisations. Data access is controlled by multiple levels of security ensuring only the right users see their data. Backups are seamlessly controlled, run automatically and can be easily restored if required.

The true cloud solution is continually monitored, with alerts going directly to the providers support teams with any issues being resolved without the need for support calls. System monitoring also allows for the system to be automatically fine-tuned ensuring the system always has the right resources in the right place at the right time and scaled automatically.

Most solution built as an en-premise or ‘hosted’ solution were not meant to be integrated via the cloud and therefore they are unstable. Our true cloud solution has been natively built for integration providing you with a standard, stable and secure API’s.