Lastest More-IQ news

February 24, 2023 / Nick Shipton
Making the Right Appointment

We've been having a little bit of fun again with our own creative skills! We may not be a polished PR and marketing team, but we know what good scheduling means and the difference having the right algorithm can make to you and your customers.

What would you do if you could generate this extra capacity?
Reduce repair leadtimes?
Free up resources for planned and preventative works?
Improve on community spaces?
Look at retrofit and green projects?

Not all scheduling is the same, not all algorithms are the same.

Drop More-IQ a line to find out more.

February 2, 2023 / Gaêl Sainson
Bob and Linda - Help yourself

Gael Sainson has been working with Bob and Linda (and their annoying jingle) to highlight another new feature of More-IQ's scheduling service..

Drop More-IQ a line to find out more.

October 4, 2021 / Nick Shipton
Our first 'White Paper'

Our first 'White Paper' - we've looked to share our experience of what we believe you need to consider when looking for a scheduling system, whether that's a standalone system integrated into your core systems, or the scheduling component of your core system.

Just because it's a component of your core system shouldn't mean your have to compromise on functionality.

If you want to discover more about how More-IQ can help with scheduling we are very happy to help and make sure you are getting the best outcomes from your systems.

Contact us via our website or message me direct on Linkedin

September 1, 2021 / Gael Sainson
Route optimisation versus global optimisation

I have been building scheduling & optimisation softwares for more than 20 years now.

I’m still amazed to find out the common belief that optimising the travel for each individual technician ends up with optimised diaries...

Nothing more wrong...

I ran a proof of concept recently on real data already ‘optimised’ with the google api … and my global optimisation algorithm reduced the total travel time by … 45% !

If you want to know more, I written a small piece of explanations here

August 15, 2021 / Nick Shipton
How flexible is your scheduler?

With most organisations having a multitude of different work-flows to deal with, can your scheduler give you the flexibility you need to ensure each and every job can be optimised in the right way.

Is your scheduler one dimensional or requires complex configuration to enable you to cope with all your work-flows?

More-IQ can offer a True Cloud, True Optimisation engine that can power your Field Service Solution across your organisation.

Global Optimisation - not just route optimisation!

July 5, 2021 / Nick Shipton
Is your scheduling truly efficient?

More-IQ are delighted to announce the launch of their new dynamic resource scheduler - More-IQ Scheduler.

More-IQ Scheduler is a new leading edge scheduler specifically built to live in the cloud and bring all the benefits of a native cloud application. Scalable, resilient, fast and rich in functionality More-IQ offers a true global optimisation algorithm that will bring an increase in efficiency even over organisations existing route planning and scheduling systems.

Offering a true cloud experience allows organisations to grow without the fear of the limitations in place with traditional schedulers, that may claim to be 'cloud' enabled but in reality are just hosted for you. These solutions can be costly to maintain, requiring expensive upgrade projects and have limitations on the number of resources and visits that can be processed.

With an extensive API suite available covering all transactions and configuration More-IQ is designed to be embedded in your core system to give a unified user experience and reduce implementation and support costs.

More-IQ have developed the solution with native cloud technology ensuring the solution can grow as required by your organisation and can be upgraded automatically and incrementally as new releases become available without any system downtime and without the need for expensive external consultancy putting you in control.

More-IQ is a true optimisation system and offers global, reactive and real time optimisation giving efficiencies over and above systems that only offer drag and drop allocation, optimisation on appointment, overnight optimisation or those using route planning API's. You need to be certain your scheduler is optimisating across you organisation and not just single operative routes.

July 14, 2021 / Nick Shipton
Is your scheduling truly efficient?

Scheduling has been an integral piece of the social housing sector for many years, but are you really seeing the benefits? Do we really know what our scheduling systems are doing, is everyone telling you they all do the same job? Have you really got the right tool for your organisation? You are probably losing efficiency if

• You have to manually choose a resource
• You have to drag and drop a job onto resource diary
• You can only allocate jobs based on trade or skill
• You are only route planning for individual resources
• You are only optimising overnight
• You aren't optimising at the appointment stage
• You are only optimising based on travel-time
• Your scheduler doesn't optimise in real time

Not only can this effect the operating efficiency of your organisation, but can have a huge knock-on effect in your ability to offer a first class level of customer service.

July 21, 2021 / Nick Shipton
Are you making the right appointment?

Delivering a service to your customers in an environment where you need to access their property and agree on an appointment slot requires a difficult balancing act of ensuring you are giving your customers a choice of convenient times, whilst ensuring that you can keep these promises, work in the most efficient way and keep costs within budget. Making the right appointment at the first point of contact via a variety of channels is probably the key process for this type of service.
Once an appointment is made you have made a promise to the customer and your scheduling solution should enable you to keep that promise. Your solution should allow you to offer the customer a variety of appointment windows, and these could be different, dependent upon the customer or the job requirement. This should then allow you to be presented with the right window of availability for that customer for that job. The next bit is the tricky bit, we want to ensure that we are now painting each of those windows to show the most efficient slots to offer the customer. This can only be done if your solution is able to provide a real-time global optimisation.

What does this mean? It means your scheduler should be able to, in a split second, calculate the cost of delivering that job to that customer in all of the appointment windows available. In order to do this, it needs to take into account the availability of the relevant resources and the jobs already booked (both appointed and non-appointed) then calculate the cost of introducing this new job.
It should be looking at potentially moving jobs around between relevant resources and pushing and pulling jobs backwards or forwards whilst maintaining all the current customer promises and business constraints.
This type of scheduling is very complex but critical to an appointment-based service and not all schedulers can do this. It’s critical you have this in place because any inefficiency you create at the first point of contact cannot be recovered even if your scheduler is subsequently ‘Optimising’.

• If you are only booking against capacity, you will be losing efficiency
• If you have fixed appointment slots, you will be losing efficiency
• If you are only using an API to a give you travel between already scheduled jobs, you will be losing efficiency
• If your scheduler is only optimising single operatives, you will be losing efficiency
• If your scheduler is only optimising after you have appointed your jobs, you will be losing efficiency

Why is it so important for the customer that we stay as efficient as possible? Surely customers don’t care about efficiency - they just want the service to be on time and of good quality?
Well not being efficient means that we lose the ability to offer the right level of service to the customer, any of the points above will mean that appointment leads times could get longer, appointments missed will increase, costs will increase having a knock-on effect on quality and customer satisfaction.
Lastly be sure that if your solution is optimising after you’ve made your appointments it isn’t removing some appointments from the schedule entirely. For some scheduling algorithms the appointment isn’t the key priority so your solution could actually be removing promises making more work for the planners to try to get these back into schedule or even worse letting your customer down.
Have you asked yourself what your scheduler is doing, and is this giving you the right result for both you and ultimately your customers?

Dont be fooled by fake optimisations

Embed a TRUE optimisation brain and make TRUE savings

More-IQ can optimise teams with thousands of technicians and manage all the complexities of your organisation

TRUE cloud, TRUE optimisation

Speak with More-IQ – True Cloud – True Optimisation