White Papers

Consumerisation of IT has become a factor in the CIO world as the workforce has acquired personal devices such as Smarthones and Tablet PCs. Users find that these devices enhance their productivity, making them more effective at their roles. Embracing this trend by creating a strong governance and security structure means the organisation and the end user will benefit.

There are challenges for CIOs, a wider range of devices need supporting so agnostic approaches to devices is required. Access to information will increase, so stress levels on the CIO’s server infrastructure will increase, as may the number of applications corporate information has to support.

The question for the CIO is how to enhance the adoption of these devices in a way that enables the organisation to capitalise on this trend. In many organisations simple business processes cannot be enacted upon via consumer devices.

For the previous 24 months, service revenue has topped the agenda of Chief Service Officers (CSOs) polled by Aberdeen. The 2010 State of Service Management research survey, and polls conducted at the 2010 CSO Summit, both found that service revenue was the top goal for CSOs to attain in 2011. At the 2011 CSO Summit, attendees once again indicated that the attainment of service revenue was the top item on their agenda for 2012. A recently conducted State of the Market poll of over 200 service leaders confirmed this data.

The growth of mobility in both the consumer and enterprise arenas is undeniable. Business leaders, in service, IT or elsewhere, cannot ignore the importance or impact of mobility on their service operations. However, the amount of information that needs to be sifted through when considering the mobilization of a field service workforce for an enterprise -- new devices, applications, operating environments, and network capabilities -- can be overwhelming...

The continued focus on field service excellence by service organizations is warranted as Aberdeen's recent survey data of over 300 organizations in December 2010 and January 2011 reflects that 58% of incoming service requests ultimately require a field dispatch of sorts.

Given that these field agents are quite often the only representatives of the organization that actually visit the customer, especially after the sale of the product, their ability to provide desired or better support in a timely manner goes a long way in setting customer perceptions of the service organization's aptitude.

ClickSoftware and Computer Weekly have come together to produce an executive overview to help provide you with the information you need to turn your service business into a profit centre. In addition to an overview of ClickSoftware's ServiceOptimization Suite, read about Konica Minolta's journey to achieving service excellence.

Brent Mayo, Customer Support Manager at Konica Minolta talks in detail about the drivers behind Konica Minolta's decision to select a solution that manages their mobile workforce, and the subsequent ROI they have recorded since implementation. The executive overview will outline the current landscape regarding customer service technology and will demonstrate how to:

• Close the gap between field service teams and service centers

• Drive operational improvement and tangible ROI

• Improve service and drive business benefit

Around the world, more and more of today's service organizations are under pressure to meet a constant and growing demand for better-quality service and an improved standard of service-level agreements. Despite the ongoing growth of the Indian economy in recent years, India is not immune from these pressures. The challenges presented by an aging workforce, and the subsequent decrease in skilled labor are already appearing.

There is a compelling need for service organizations in India to plan their longer-term service strategies now, taking into account the gap between the demand for service and their capacity for meeting that demand with future in-house employees and subcontractors. This white paper is an essential read for anyone who is involved in running a service business in India.

Research firm IDC predicts that some 1.2 billion workers will be using mobile enterprise tools by 2011, representing roughly a third of the total global workforce (February 2010). Some of these people are almost exclusively mobile, whereas some will only occasionally use mobile enterprise tools. Whatever the case, there are very few who would argue against the fact that investing in mobility has the potential to raise productivity, accessibility and visibility.

Automating mobile workforce management can allow insurers to increase efficiency and improve service levels. When business is tough, that’s a great advantage.

This White Paper will discuss:

• Customer Appointment Scheduling
• Automated Field Workforce Scheduling
• Planned Policies for Extreme Service Scenarios
• Ongoing Process Optimization
• Mobility Solutions

Since early 2009 the cost of fuel has doubled, with no reprieve in sight. For a typical service organization, this could result in additional annual costs of $2,500 per vehicle; bringing today’s cost to $5,000 per vehicle per year. This has made service managers acutely aware of the need to control the service fleet’s fuel costs, and many ideas on how to reduce fuel consumption, as well as get fuel at lower costs, have emerged.

Download this white paper now to read more!

This article, which focuses on the American rail industry outlines how workforce management and optimization software, which has many years of success in improving the efficiencies of individual people and crews across multiple industries, can also play a vital role in the pursuit of minimizing train crew fatigue.

With all the changes and new demands on your field service operation, is it any wonder you have a hard time keeping up? One thing's for sure: if your field service operation is not efficient or can't keep up with the times, your company costs can go through the roof.

Find out how companies like yours are effectively managing their field workforces with service optimization technology.

The scheduling of field resources is an immensely varied and complex problem to solve. Within one company there can be many different types of field resources, work types, shifts and customers. For organizations that are considering a mobile workforce scheduling solution, there are a host of things to consider; cost versus benefit, change management concerns, personnel needed to implement the project and so on.

This whitepaper delves deeper into how an optimized scheduling solution considers the variances within a service business and takes advantage of the optimization points to deliver service delivery improvement.

The proliferation of consumer-level applications on mobile devices (e.g. iPhone, iPad, Android etc.) is impacting the business world. Business people expect to have the same connectivity and ease of use with their company's business applications on their mobile devices as they do with consumer applications, such as travel instructions or making reservations in a restaurant. They also expect a far higher speed of delivering such business applications.

Why should a mobile business application take years to develop, given the rapid appearance and updates of consumer apps?

The purpose of this paper is to identify the components of a typical mobile enterprise solution , and to define the role each of them provides the user. The paper focuses on the unique roles and differences between a server-side enterprise application, a client-side mobile application, mobile business frameworks (MBF) and mobile infrastructure frameworks (MIF).

This whitepaper explores the relationship between each of these solutions and recommends best practices strategies, optimized combinations and mobile solution designs, and illustrates these recommendations by examining the combination of ClickSoftware's Mobility Suite with the Sybase mobility solutions.

This white paper explores the sophisticated optimization provided by the shift planning and scheduling product, ClickRoster. This product is transforming the way that service organizations better manage their shift planning and staff rostering processes.

Ideally, when contractors are given their daily or weekly schedules, the service organization should have confidence in their skills and capacity to complete the work orders assigned. And in return, while working in the field, contractors should have access to work order information.

Accordingly, when the contracted field resource needs to report back on the service delivery, this information should be reported immediately, streamlining the flow of work-order status information to the service organization. This give-and-take is critical for the success of both the contractors and the service organization as a whole.

Download this whitepaper and see how you get there.

While hand written notes or notes written on hands are all the crazy in the US political sphere, this medium of information storage and reuse is probably not what most service organizations have in mind when looking to provide workers with the necessary tools and information while in the field.

For one, the information isn’t dynamic and unlike in politics where the same static message might continue to ring up support or applause, the dynamic nature of service work and customer expectations requires that service technicians have the most up-to-date information regarding the particular asset or customer that they are servicing. Also given the fact that service technicians often work in hot, humid conditions may also minimize the recall value of notes written on hands.

In the current economic climate more than ever, it is critical for companies to have control of their business and make sure that every second is put to productive use. It is also important, and possible, to give more control of the service experience to the consumer.

This white paper discusses how continuous communication between the customer and service organization leads to shared control, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

From our experience of working with a wide variety of service organizations, we have encountered several reasons for bundling tasks. Some of these reasons are straightforward, while others deserve a more intricate explanation.

This whitepaper presents the concept of task bundling and examines when it is better to treat a large number of small tasks as a bundle that should be scheduled and performed as a cohesive group, and when there are exceptional reasons to separate the bundle into its constituent tasks and treat some of them individually.

Capacity reservation is a proactive approach whereby the scheduling system allocates a certain amount of the resources' capacity to attend to specific service types. Organizations that follow this approach will meet their service level policy while keeping high resource utilization and will be able to predict a preferably accurate schedule.

Having said that, it can be a challenge to achieve the right levels of capacity reservation; if you allocate the wrong capacities, you may find yourself with underutilization and/or a low service level.

In Australia, large field service organisations are at a crossroads when it comes to providing customers with required levels of service. While many of them have implemented scheduling solutions, they have found that some core concerns are still not being addressed.

Specifically, most of the service management systems in use today are far too manual in nature, and rely on individuals to undertake most scheduling decisions - often with inadequate information. This, in turn, leads to a second overriding issue: the inability of these systems to assist the organisation in efficiently managing resource levels and meeting service level agreements.

Download this white paper now to read more!

There is always much talk about the benefits of service optimization, but service executives have yet to see an objective study that systematically measures how companies using optimization measure up to industry standards.

Well, now they can. A new study, recently published by Downton Consulting, compares productivity and efficiency in companies using optimization to industry averages established by a similar study of member companies of the Association for Services Management International.

Small and midsized service organizations (or SMBs) continue in their transformation from cost centers to profit centers. This idea of strategic service management, where customer service is embraced as a key differentiator, thrives even among the smallest service organizations. Sixty percent (60%) of SMBs currently operate as profit centers and an additional 18% plan to manage as profit centers with financial and operational goals within the next 18 months.

Therefore, operating as a profit center is not unique to the service organizations of large companies, but has indeed taken root even among the smallest firms. However, the size of the organization does play a role in market perspective, and this benchmark report seeks to uncover that which is unique to the small and midsize service organizations as they compete for market share.