Gas Servicing
OPTI-TIME features built in support for gas (or other cyclical) service planning.
As with all work, OPTI-TIME is designed to compliment the core job management system. The core system will maintain the anniversary date for the inspection and manage escalation where there is difficulty gaining access. OPTI-TIME’s job is to ensure resources are used as effectively as possible and to make it easy to offer revised appointment times to tenants who call in following receipt of an initial letter.
Because a majority of the ‘appointments’ will be unconfirmed, a higher level of no-access is unavoidable and this needs to be factored into the diary loading to ensure there is enough work to keep inspectors busy.
The planned nature of the work often means tight geographical clustering will be possible, for example, a day’s schedule may be in a single street or block. OPTI-TIME holds a ‘walk sort’ sequence for all addresses, so the schedule for the day can be sequenced based on how the operative will walk down the street.
There are several strategies than be employed and OPTI-TIME has been designed to support whatever way of working an organisation believes most appropriate. One approach is to provide a pool of work for a day and let the inspector spend the day in the area getting access to as many of the properties as possible. In this scenario, he will call back on missed properties repeatedly attempting to gain access and almost certainly have surplus jobs that may not get started.
An alternative is to manage the day in a similar way to responsive work, using OPTI-TIME to drive the day one job at a time via a handheld device. The advantage of this lies in the evidenced belief that centrally managing a resource's time and having real-time visibility of what is being done drives significantly higher levels of work in a day. Obviously a different way of handling no-access needs to be determined, but this could involve responsibility being handed off to a planner who would keep trying to contact the tenant, and then plan the job back into the same day if they were back at home.
As with all development in OPTI-TIME, the servicing capability has been designed around customers’ best practice examples, with flexibility as the main requirement. Having visibility of resources across all teams in a single place has great value and gives the planners the maximum range of options in meeting appointment promises or reacting to unexpected events in the day.