Service Industries
Forecasting and Planning Solutions Improve SLA Compliance and Productivity
From Aberdeen | December 05, 2007
The recently published study--"Underpinnings of Service Excellence: Synchronizing Resource Capacity with Service Demand"--reveals that service organizations who have taken strategic actions to accurately forecast service demand and effectively plan and provision service resources to meet that demand have realized 22% increase in first-time fix rate, 18% higher SLA compliance rate, 27% improvement in workforce utilization, and 14% lower overtime costs.
"Aligning demand with resources enables a company to not only deploy the right technician with the right part at the right time resulting in high customer satisfaction, but also allows the company to move away from a state of constant fire-fighting," said Amit Jain, Research Director at Aberdeen and author of the report. "Financial gains from productivity improvements make it a no-brainer."
Other highlights from the report include:
1. Best-in-Class firms are 8 times as likely as the rest to report First-time Fix Rate of over 96%
2. Best-in-Class firms are 4 times as likely as the rest to report Work-order Completed Late of less than 5%
3. Best-in-Class firms are 3 times as likely as the rest to report SLA Compliance Rate of over 96%
4. Best-in-Class firms are 4 times as likely as the rest to measure planning and demand accuracy in real time
Jain recommends that service organizations consider the following Best-in-Class strategies as potential building blocks of a successful service organization:
1. Improve productivity by establishing guidelines for type and frequency of communications among dispatchers and field technicians.
<dt>2. Document all constraints that impact field service work order allocation to effectively plan, forecast and provision resources.
3. Take stock of existing technology infrastructure and plug the gaps to enable closed loop service management.
4. Take multiple factors into account in order to accurately forecast work-order demand.
Integrate customer, contract and asset information with demand forecasting and planning processes.
Over 200 companies participated in this quantitative study, including Xerox, WR Grace, Mitutoyo, Bang & Olufsen, Grundfos Management, BARCO, ABB, Rinker Materials, Wartsila, SAIC, TAMI, Honeywell HBS, NALCO, AGCO limited, FLIR Systems, Bausch & Lomb, PLDT, and Ingersoll Rand.
http://www.aberdeen.com
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