Service businesses like roll-offs, HVAC, delivery services, septic, sewer and drain, traditionally have been a customer demand-driven activity. A customer calls with a problem, such as:
· Need a roll-off
· Furnace failing
· Need delivery
· The backyard smells bad,
· and so on.
How soon can you be here?? What these calls mean to your business is customer demand scheduling, i.e., the customer calls and you try to get there within four hours. Most businesses use this as a guide when developing their dispatching procedures: how, when and in what order to send out the trucks each day. This is great for your customer, but may not be so profitable for your business.
Most negative responses (inability to meet customer’s request) to this type of call cause the customer to go down the yellow pages and pick the next name in the list and you will lose the sale. Unfortunately, being driven by customer demand scheduling is the most expensive way to run your company. It requires you to keep on hand equipment and drivers with free time to service these new calls, which is very, very expensive! Even if the drivers are not sitting in your shop, they are typically on the road with only a partial day’s work and we all know “how work expands to fill the available time”.
Let me suggest that a business has several types of customers and that, by maintaining a proper mix, your business can be run more efficiently and with higher levels of profit. Let’s look at each of the several types of customers and estimate the time and business tools it takes to handle each type of service call.
This is the customer we have been discussing. They need immediate help. These customers require same-day service. This usually means extra travel time and extra trips. This travel time comes from not being in the area, and the extra trips to the get equipment is a result of no lead time. If a job usually takes about 1.25 hours, the extra travel time and partial trips easily add ¾ to an 1 hour on average to same-day service. A good question to ask yourself is: If it costs more to handle same-day service, do you charge more?
This market segment consists of those customers who want regular services as a maintenance procedure. This type of service can be very profitable if you can schedule the call to make several stops in the same area and in the correct order so that you minimize your travel time. In order to take advantage of this type of customer you need to implement the following procedures:
· Know where and when you have committed your drivers and trucks to work in the future.
· Use regular reminders by date and area so that you have a good mixture of customers who can be scheduled and customers who need same-day service.
· Manage new customer calls to see if you can schedule the service rather than handle on the same day, i.e., promise service when you are already in the customer's area.
This market segment consists of customers who require regular periodic service, e.g., grease accounts, commercial waste, etc. Dispatching for this type of customer depends upon having good reminder practices that allow you to group your customers by date and area and arrange work to maximize number of stops per trip to the dump. The standing or re-accruing work orders is the tool to make sure these customers are serviced at the right date and time.
You can see that each of these market segments require different policies and management tools to handle correctly. The most profitable situation is when you can schedule all your jobs in advance. Clearly your customers have a certain degree of flexibility, but asking a person to wait until “Next Tuesday” when the it is freezing out side and the furnace has failed or the basement is flooding, will not work. This is why a mixture of customer types, where you can maintain a high customer service level and still run a profitable operation, is best.
Some of the key issues that a business has to consider when deciding if they are going to schedule jobs vs. respond to customer demand scheduling are:
· Accepting different types of work
· Using work orders to track jobs
· Selection and use of management tools for work orders, e.g., F4, Standing orders
· Telephone skills to manage customers’ requests for service
Scheduling customers correctly can mean the difference between running a profitable business and seeing your expenses outpace your income. The key point here is to plan ahead by knowing where you will be sending trucks and keeping enough flexibility in the routes to insert the on-demand customers and, if necessary, re-schedule the more-flexible maintenance stops to other days when the on-demand customers exceed your scheduled capacity.
Routing of services is key to the profitability of your operations. Proper routing is the difference between successful operations and not knowing why you are working so hard, but never getting ahead. The TAC system for service office support contains many features aimed at:
· Minimizing the clerical effort in maintaining the daily pump routes
· Producing work orders and driver route sheets to manage daily activity
· Minimizing data entry in entering daily driver activity
· Providing a clear and accurate analysis of pumping activity to spot areas of potential operational improvement
The following section details the major features that are used to manage, monitor and improve routing activity. This consists of a four-step process.
1. Generate work order
2. Manage work order grouping, i.e., routing and order
3. Print driver route sheet
4. Print work orders for a route/day
The generation of the work order is one of the building blocks of managing your business. The work order is an operational document in that it contains information about the service location, which includes:
· Service address
· Billing address
· Equipment information including location, condition, etc.
· Scanned images of equipment location
The work order acts as a marketing document in that it demonstrates your company’s professionalism by keeping clear and accurate records of your customers facilites most important The TAC system is designed for the entry and printing of work orders as easily and quickly as possible. Some features that help in this area include:
· Automatic numbering
· Automatic date and translation to day of week
· Reference file look-up of route number
· Automatic field population of driver name and truck number based upon route number
· Automatic population of work order type and default rate from site Master
· Capability to save and print work orders later in bulk for a day
· F4 pop-up window to view current pump schedule to group customer requests
The last feature is key to improving the efficiency of your operations. When a customer calls for service, you can look at future days when you have already committed to a customer in the same area. By working with the customer on the day of service, you can minimize driving time between locations and maximize number of jobs per day. This results in getting higher revenue with the same amount of equipment and driver time. A very powerful tool!
At the end of the current day, you can review work for the next day by pressing the F4 key that pops up the list of work orders for schedule date entered.
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You can change the route, driver, schedule date and stop number on the list to re-route scheduled services in an order that minimizes driving time and maximizes utilization
Now that all stops are in the best order, you can go to the next step and print the driver route sheet.
The driver route sheet is a printed listing of all stops assigned to a route/driver for a scheduled date. The information printed includes customer address, directions, comments and all free text entries assigned to customer and any special instructions fromthe work order. With this printed, the driver has all the information about the customers on the route including any comments on problems or special service instructions from the Customer Master Record.
The only thing the driver is missing is the work order to document the service. You can print all the work orders for a schedule date with one selection. A clipboard with the work orders and the driver route sheet on top is a total package for handling the day’s services.
Some customers require regular service. The TAC system supports this by allowing you to automatically schedule work orders in a periodic interval(s) using standing or re-occurring work orders