Developed jointly with Infosys Technologies, FOS was designed to automate and centralize the telecoms giant’s field resource management while still leaving regional offices some autonomy. Armed with better scheduling and allocation of resources, BT sought to improve productivity of its mobile workforce and provide customers with a more accurate estimate of when a problem could be fixed.
But BT’s search for a commercial package hit a brick wall. The complexity of the organization meant we couldn’t get an off-the-shelf system to manage our field workforce, said Gilbert Owusu, technical group leader at BT’s intelligent systems research center.
Although off-the-shelf tools existed for the manufacturing industry, there was nothing targeted specifically at the services sector that could offer the ERP-style breadth of requirements the company needed, so BT looked for a partner to develop a bespoke toolset.
FOS was a fusion of BT and Infosys expertise. BT provided its core optimization (iOpt), demand and forecasting engines (iForecast) to the party, while Infosys introduced its J2EE Enterprise Application Framework Infosys RADIEN.
By summer 2006, after an eight month staged roll-out, all 28,000 field engineers were using FOS.
Allocation of resources and performance has improved greatly under the new system. Each of BT’s 10 regional centers is broken down into groups of engineers working locally. Pre-FOS, those regions and groups each employed different techniques to schedule work and measure performance, and relied heavily on the expertise of individual resource managers.
It was a combination of guesswork, bespoke systems and spreadsheets, so if the CEO wanted visibility of performance people came up with their own ways of measuring it, said Owusu.
FOS has standardized performance measurement across the regions and gives BT a clear picture of the skills of engineers and how successfully jobs are completed.
Advanced mathematical algorithms predict where engineers are needed and identify if overtime or extra staff should be drafted in to cope with demand fluctuations. It means that BT can adapt far faster to market changes.
Out in the field, engineers use their laptops or handhelds to access information on the web-based system and make sure they start the next day in the best location to carry out all their daily visits. They can also use FOS to change shifts with other engineers or arrange cover, so that the customer service does not suffer.
From a resource manager’s perspective, FOS can be used to book or cancel team meetings. It also makes it far easier for them to collaborate with different regions, reallocating field engineers to other areas. as demand requires.
