THE COMPANY Empresas Publicas de Medellin E.S.P. (EPM) is the largest multi-utility company in Colombia, with market-leading businesses in the Power and Water sectors. EPM participates in the power sector through generation, transmission, distribution and commercialization of electricity and distribution and commercialization of natural gas. In the water sector, EPM participates through water and sewage businesses.

THE CHALLENGE EPM, a Click client since 2016, approached us in August 2018 because they were experiencing a few schedule optimization issues and wanted to find ways to fix them. Specifically, EPM was concerned about:

• Long drive times to appointments, leading to employee complaints

• Jobs with a high priority were being assigned after other lower priority tasks, resulting in missed SLAs for high priority jobs and, in some cases, the dispatchers had to reschedule the Gant on a daily basis

• An imbalanced schedule that resulted in low technician utilization

• Jobs were being scheduled towards their expiration date, increasing the probability that EPM will not perform the service on time and violate the terms of an SLA

EPM Improves Utilization rates with Click’s Optimization Tuning Services

THE SOLUTION Click’s Professional Services Optimization Consulting team met with a group at EPM to get a clearer understanding of their current optimization processes and specific workflows. After these meetings, we developed a plan that revolved around these areas:

a. Tune the system to enable more intelligent automation and align the design and configurations with best practices

b. Fix some existing data/configuration issues, including:

• Switched to ‘Street Level Routing’ instead of aerial calculation to improve the travel calculation logic

• Corrected the Appointment Booking and Schedule Idle resource functionality to fit business needs

• Corrected Work Prioritization (Dynamic Priority) logic in the system according to business needs to improve scheduling quality

c. Better define business goals and quality metrics, such as improved jobs prioritization definitions, and tune the scheduling policy to comply with these objectives

d. General customer education to enable them to better leverage the tool and its capabilities in order to increase productivity in areas such as territory planning, appointment booking, optional hours, semi-automatic scheduling capabilities, dispatch methods, FSE related benefits, etc.

CASE STUDY

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EPM AND CLICKSOFTWARE CASE STUDY

• TRAVEL TIME: A 24% REDUCTION THAT INCREASED EMPLOYEE UTILIZATION.

• JOBS RESPONSE TIME (TIME TO ARRIVE): AN 18% REDUCTION, ALLOWING EPM TO SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE THE NUMBER OF JOBS SCHEDULED AFTER THEIR DUE DATE. THIS ALSO HELPED TO BALANCE THE SCHEDULE LEADING TO AN INCREASE IN TECHNICIAN UTILIZATION.

After the engagement, EPM expressed satisfaction with the delivered services and confirmed that complaints from the field had decreased significantly. After each engagement, we deliver a Customer Satisfaction survey and EPM ranked Click at a 10 out of 10, further showing the benefits of optimization services.

RESULTS: After the optimization tuning engagement, the following business goals and improvements were detailed:

After we identified the primary issues and agreed on the objectives, we recommended two service offerings:

• Optimization Level 1: service engagement to increase schedule automation at the company to help EPM reduce manual work performed by the dispatchers on a daily basis

• Schedule Optimization Tuning (SOT): service to improve scheduling quality to help reduce the travel costs and prioritize work more effectively.