Telenet

The client

Telenet is one of Belgium’s largest telecom operators, offering TV, phone and internet services to millions of clients. As a crucial part of their business, Telenet employs hundreds of technicians tasked with maintaining, repairing and expanding their telecom infrastructure.

The case

The business case of Telenet was focused on optimizing the driving time of the 650+ technicians between the assignments and maximizing the number of assignments in one workday for each of the technicians.This is the most common objective for the field service activity: Replacing lost inefficient time into value added time.

After carefully analysing the requirements of the client, Freebility designed a planning optimization tool that that considers a wide array of elements when designing a planning proposal:

• The start and end destination of a technician’s workday
• The available time in a workday
• The skill and/or certification of each technician
• The time a technician needs on premise at a client based on the type of activity
• The number of assignments to be performed by the workforce
• Holidays and sickness
• Urgent enquiries
• Unpredictable events and circumstances

As usual, Freebility then fully integrated the planning tool into the existing IT infrastructure at Telenet. For example, by integrating with the external communication service at Telenet, the planning software is able to automatically Inform customers of ETA of the technician by email or SMS. Additionally, using GPS data, the planner was able to take geographical location into account when designing and updating the planning.

The results

In the end, our planning tool led to a number of crucial advantages for Telenet:

• An increase in the number of visits per day
• Areduction of the travel time between visits
• A reduction of overtime caused by unrealistic plans