Commercial catering and refrigeration equipment provider Serviceline has automated its engineer scheduling with Maxoptra's planning system.

Serviceline has 120 engineers collectively possessing more than 400 different skill sets. Planning, matching and allocating work to the best qualified service engineer is very challenging, especially when new jobs come in during the day, which continually changes priorities.  

“We had this vision of what we wanted the business to achieve. For us, customer service is key. It’s all about communication, the relationship you build and maintain with your customers. We always had a belief that if we could automate the planning and scheduling process to quickly provide the information our people needed to make the best decisions, then they would have more time to talk to customers,” said Steve Elliott, managing director of Serviceline. 

“Maxoptra is the embodiment of that concept. It is the first and only dynamic scheduling and planning system that we have found which does that, where there is the programming functionality to take away 90 percent of what our staff had to do manually.” 

Elliott continued: “It used to take six months for a new planner or dispatcher to learn fully how to use the two booking systems we used to manage the complexity. Now we have complete visibility of where our engineers are and the status of each job. This allows us to consider options and make the best routing and planning decisions quickly. Maxoptra is a central part of what we are doing.” 

Maxoptra is fully integrated with the company's telematics platform, to provide a map based real time display of vehicle location, job status and work schedule.

Serviceline can now have optimised schedules from Maxoptra sent directly to in-cab terminals, allowing the field engineers to navigate to their jobs and report their progress in real time. The system also highlights variances from plan.