If you want shorter journey times, you may need bigger field team boundaries.

Journey times are a major headache for field teams because they reduce productivity, increase costs, and lead to employee fatigue. To tackle this issue, you should think about reviewing your field team boundaries.

Boundaries are an essential part of field team management as they determine which team member handles which task – without boundaries your scheduling systems can’t work. So, surely smaller boundaries would reduce travel time since the team has a smaller area to cover. Right?!

Well, counterintuitively, our experience working with field teams across multiple sectors has shown that larger boundaries often result in shorter journeys and higher efficiency.

Why can bigger boundaries result in shorter journeys for field teams?

Larger boundaries enable scheduling systems to work more efficiently because it creates more options for the system.
This additional flexibility can combat some of the biggest field team efficiency challenges:

• Service Level Agreement Failures: Urgent issues such as equipment failures and service disruptions can necessitate immediate attention, disrupting planned schedules. If the operational teams are confined to small rigid geographic boundaries, reallocating technicians across these boundaries to meet SLA requirements becomes complicated and arduous for the scheduling team.
• Resource locations: Resupply and restocking issues arise when critical resources like repair parts or tools are located outside assigned boundaries, complicating logistics and increasing journey times.
• Specialist’s locations: Tasks requiring specialised knowledge, such as handling high-voltage equipment or complex system repairs, may be less efficient if specialists have to travel across multiple boundaries, leading to inefficiencies and delays.

Bigger boundaries with better operational flexibility mean you can optimise travel more effectively. For example, a technician can cover tasks that are geographically closer within the same trip, rather than crisscrossing multiple smaller zones. Larger boundaries also provide better options for resource placement, allowing you to locate them centrally relative to jobs, reducing travel distances.

When are big boundaries too big?

So, should you combine every field team boundary into one? Not necessarily. While larger boundaries give you more choices, the increased data to collect and process could overwhelm your systems. Operationally, smaller boundaries are easier to manage from a team perspective and might better fit your workforce footprint.

You need to find the perfect balance: big enough to offer flexibility but small enough to be manageable.

Using FME to combine your data

We help our clients determine the optimal boundaries by using a platform called FME to combine their operational and spatial data.

FME allows anyone to create technical workflows to manage their data through a simple drag and drop interface. Specialising in working with complicated spatial data, this sophisticated tool can also be used to connect hundreds of applications, manage multiple data formats and create time-saving automations.

Working out the best boundary size

Your scheduling system already delivers core operational stats such as jobs per technician, job duration and travel time etc, but it lacks the sophisticated, location-based variance analysis that shows where factors like boundaries are holding back the operation.

We have implemented FME to deliver this analysis on a project and, more importantly, on an ongoing basis. This current information can then be used by your operational team to combine with their expert on-the-ground experience to really understand what is going on. Empowering your team – not presenting a project.

Your modelling could factor in:

• Farmer, Hunter, and Raiders: Use your operational data to figure out how many jobs were delivered by technicians from the area team (Farmers), by technicians from a bordering team (Hunters), or by technicians from a remote team (Raiders). In water utilities, this identifies when and why certain regions are over-relying on distant teams and how that can be better balanced going forward.
• Work Distribution: Compare the geographical spread and proximity of jobs among technicians to identify areas where travel distances are unnecessarily long, allowing for better allocation of work to reduce journey times.
• Proximity of Work Assignments: Analyse how often tasks were completed by a technician when another technician was nearby. This can highlight potential overlaps in task allocation, leading to more efficient routing and shorter journeys.
• Start Locations: By examining the proximity of technicians’ starting points to their work centres, you can optimise dispatch strategies, ensuring that technicians begin their day closer to their assigned tasks, thus reducing unnecessary travel time.

You don’t have to use FME just for boundary modelling. With this integration, you can have a continuous, near real-time stream of data to feed into your business intelligence and scheduling systems.

By leveraging FME’s powerful spatial analysis and real-time data capabilities, you can not only determine the optimum size for your boundaries but also improve technicians’ travel efficiency and overall resource management. This means ensuring that technicians can quickly and efficiently address everything from minor issues to major infrastructure failures, ultimately improving service reliability and customer satisfaction.