Analyst Reports
Today facility service providers are faced with several challenges for growing business resiliency in increasingly turbulent times. Elevated operational costs from economic uncertainty, rising fuel and energy charges, and fierce competition that is growing with competitors challenging organizations on price, services, and the promise of innovation.
Clients are also changing. They are now bringing an expanding set of requirements to the table and searching for evidence that their facility service provider can support their needs, whether it’s with hybrid workplace strategies, energy management or sustainability objectives.
To remain successful, organizations are constantly re-evaluating the balance between meeting or exceeding customer expectations and managing overall costs. While cost reduction is a constant goal, organizations often lack detailed insights into how to improve management of actual day-to-day costs. This is where the Planon Artificial Resource Scheduler can prove to be a significant benefit in improving management of real-time operational costs through resource scheduling optimization.
With scheduling optimization, facility service providers will benefit across 10 distinct areas:
- Increase back office efficiency through automation
- Retain talented employees
- Improve employee capacity
- Reduce fleet fuel, energy consumption, and operating costs
- Achieve scale and increased profitability
- Identify scheduling bottlenecks before they become a problem
- Increase facility service delivery capacity
- Improve sustainability credentials
- Prevent compliance penalties
- Grow customer satisfaction, loyalty, and spend
Without scheduling optimization, resource scheduling will only become an ever more complex, time consuming, and expensive activity (see Figure 1). The best part is, the more schedules you optimize, the more you will benefit from an increase in the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) on your investment.
Figure 1: Complexity of scheduling work orders
Future-ready facility service providers, striving to remain competitive, will turn to resource scheduling optimization. Analyst firm Gartner forecasts that by 2025, algorithms and bots will schedule over 66% of appointments for service providers using automated scheduling optimization, up from less than 25% in 2019. Now, let’s dive deeper into the benefits you can capture.
Planon Artificial Resource Scheduler
The Planon Artificial Resource Scheduler (ARS) is a new product for use with the Planon Facility Services Business Solution. This product extends the functionality of the existing Resource Scheduling product included with the Planon Facility Services Business Solution. Service planners are now able to use artificial intelligence drive algorithms to generate an optimized work schedule for facility services teams. This schedule takes into account relevant parameters, such as already planned orders, worker skills and certificates, service level agreements, working hours, and job locations.
After optimization, work schedules for facility services teams can be manually adjusted to account for emergency work, delays in work completion or other unanticipated scenarios such as a team member calling in sick. With that in mind, facility service planners have detailed insight into the current and future workload of teams to identify potential scheduling conflicts and resolve them before they become a problem.
Stay tuned as next time we will dive deeper into Planon Artificial Resource Scheduler and how it can contribute to operational excellence, business growth, sustainability, employee happiness and customer satisfaction.
Are you a facility services provider exploring how resource scheduling optimization can benefit your organization? Then reach out to us to schedule a demo and discuss the possibilities.
