Severn Trent Water uses scheduling system to put engineering teams in the field for longer

Severn Trent Water is using a sophisticated scheduling system to organise the workload of more than 1,000 mobile staff.

The utility had been using a bespoke tool that was too simplistic to deal with the pressures of organising its workforce, says project manager Mark Wood.

‘Our old system was very simple. It was not able to understand things such as business requirements and rules such as the availability of any given person or team, or what is needed for a certain type of job,’ he said.

‘Most importantly it could not understand things such as service level agreements (SLAs).’

Software supplied by Workplace Systems now issues jobs directly to mobile staff equipped with handheld computers, cutting time spent returning to the office to collect job information and improving customer responsiveness.

‘Before, if we received a call from a customer it would lead to a job being created in the job management system, where it would be manually reviewed by a scheduler, and then issued to the right resource,’ said Wood.

Severn Trent has increased its SLA fulfilment from 50 to 70 per cent.

‘I expect us to achieve up to 80 per cent fulfilment once we exploit it more fully,’ said Wood.