Product Innovations

At OPSI Systems we strive to anticipate the needs of our customers.

In this spirit, we have developed FieldForce - software that ensures that services such as sales and promotions happen on time, that workload amongst fieldmarketers is balanced and that the fewest kilometres are travelled in the process. Read more >>>

 

FieldForce

FieldForce optimizes all field personnel by territory with a multi-day planning horizon by:

1. Defining areas / territories and balancing workload between employees

• Complies with customer service day and visit requirements
• Balances service level and cost
• Adheres to expected time at customer
• Follows customer visit frequency requirement
  • Any number of days a week
  • Weekly
  • Fortnightly
  • Monthly or 4 week cycle
• Improves customers visit time to travel time ratio by increasing customer visits per employee per day

2. Routing and scheduling using the balanced workload per territory

• Allows dynamic changes to be made such as due to
• Staff illness or changes
• Urgent customer requests
• Best sequence of stops at customers
• Minimizes distance traveled
• Reduces labour cost with less regular time and less overtime worked
• Reduces transportation costs
  • Less vehicles required
  • Less fuel usage
  • Other variable vehicle costs such as maintenance, insurance, depreciation are reduced

3. Improving customer service levels

• On time service
• Fewer if any missed appointments
• Compares the day's scheduled appointments and times with the actual (as travelled) stops and times.

4. Management reporting

• Exception reports
• 'Scheduled to actual' comparison
• Compare customer 'promise to actual'

FieldForce optimally defines a company's sales, marketing or service areas by balancing workload and minimizing the distances travelled

• FieldForce balances workload over a specific period for each staff member based on customer visit frequencies.
• FieldForce creates optimal routes and schedules thereby decreasing distances travelled as well as travel time.
• Through the optional integration with tracking software, FieldForce allows efficient management of personnel through reports such as planned trips vs. actual traveled.
• FieldForce used with FLO's routing engine allows for efficient “van sales” routing, using balanced load territory planning with the customer sales history to predict the mix and volume of products to be loaded for the day.

Benefits resulting from utilizing FieldForce

• Minimizes distance traveled.
• Reduces costs.
• Improves customer service levels.
• More efficient management of personnel.

Personnel Routing

Through an improvement of personnel management and operations, numerous benefits can be achieved. Improvements in sales, marketing and service representative efficiency leads to decreased distances travelled, decreased costs and improved customer service levels. With optimally defined territories, balanced workloads and optimal routes, efficient staff management and activities follow. Field personnel may be taking orders for delivery the next day or in the following delivery cycle. In cases such as these it may be preferable for the delivery routes to follow the same territories covered by the sales representatives. In these cases it is also necessary to keep the delivery constraints in mind when defining the territories and routes for the field force.

Defining Territories

A territory is defined as an area serviced by a specific representative comprising of a certain number and various types of customers. One of the most important parts of managing personnel is to define the correct territories. Several factors must be taken into account when defining territories.

One of the critical aspects of territory definition is workload balance. Workload is defined as the number of hours worked per representative per time period. If the representative is overloaded with work, he or she will not be able to visit all of his/her clients for a particular day. Some clients will thus be neglected, negatively impacting customer service levels. With a low workload, the representative is underutilized and cost may exceed value.

Another factor to consider is overlapping of territories and the total distance travelled. In order to manage a representative effectively, territories should be defined in such a way that the representative can feel that he/she has ownership of a specific geographical area. This in turn generates a feeling of responsibility for that area by the representative. It is also not optimal to have two representatives servicing the same area, as this will result in wasted kilometers. This is especially true if the staff concerned live far away from the area.

Another effect of overlapping territories is that the representatives territories may become very large in order to achieve the required workload, thereby increasing the number of kilometers travelled. In cases where the company compensates the representatives for kilometers driven, this will have an impact on the cost.

OPSI Systems, through FieldForce, defines territories that balance the workload whilst still minimizing the distance travelled and thus the cost. The figure below illustrates an example of territory cuts for an area. In some cases, it is unavoidable to have an overlapping of territories since a requirement is to balance workload. For example, in an area where workload is exceptionally high two representatives could be required to cover the area in order to satisfy the demand of that area, within the time period provided.

Within the Metropolitan areas, such as large cities, it is also necessary to maintain a limited number of overlapping territories for reasons already mentioned. The figure below illustrates an example of territory cuts within a metropolitan area combining some high density territories with a mixed high density and rural territory.

Incorporating Customer Visit Frequency

Customers are unique and should be treated as such. Different customers require different service levels, for example a larger customer may require a visit every week whilst a smaller customer may require a visit only once a month. For this reason, it is necessary to balance customer visits over a specific period. In such a way, the workload is not only balanced per representative territory but also per representative day.

Example

Say you have three customers, Customer A, Customer B and Customer C, the first requiring one visit a week, the second one visit every two weeks and the third one visit every four weeks. If all three customers were slotted in on a Monday, there would be an imbalance on Mondays which would need balancing with other customers. With the addition of customer constraints, service level requirements and varying distances between customers, this task is very difficult without specialized tools such as FieldForce.

Creating routes for representatives

Routing is another very important aspect of efficiently managing representatives. Optimal routing results in two major benefits namely, cost savings and customer service improvements. When representatives have an optimal route to follow each day, savings in the distance travelled are achieved. Another benefit is improved levels of customer service. A field representative could service more customers per day (or increase the time spent at customers) through the implementation of optimal routes. This is achievable by staff spending less time driving, thereby having more time to spend on essential customer services. By increasing the number of customers visited every day, the number of representatives required to satisfy demand decreases thereby creating an additional opportunity for decreasing costs.

Another benefit gained from creating routes for your staff is better time management. Since each of the stops occurs with an expected arrival time and expected departure time, representatives are able to manage their time more efficiently with resulting better customer service levels.

FieldForce takes into account many factors when generating routes namely, customer opening and closing times, time at customer, traffic factors, travel time and customer priority.

Even if representatives were able to work 12 hours a day, customers may not be open during part of this time. Therefore, it is very important to take into account the opening and closing times of customer and any other restrictions placed on the time of a visit. For example, a customer may not be open during lunch hours.

The variable time spent at customers must also be taken into account when creating the schedules to ensure that a representative does not have more visits scheduled than the time available to complete the visits.

Since the time spent traveling may be long, traffic plays a role in the available work time per day. Travel speeds in the mornings and afternoons will be slower, because of increased traffic on the roads, than during the day. These peak travel times are incorporated into the optimization of the routes.

Some customers may have special requirements when it comes to representative visits. It may be wise to schedule a visit to a difficult customer first since the time at this customer may exceed the expected visit time and the representative will then be able to compensate for this during the rest of the day.

Tracking and Reporting

To maximize the benefit of FieldForce, there is the ability to integrate with various tracking systems using OPSI’s GPS module. With this feature, a comparison between the planned route and reality can be made. Generating planned vs. actual reports will be beneficial to smooth out irregularities in the routing as well as misuse of vehicles and deviation from the planned route. Improvements in managing representatives can be obtained by running reports such as planned vs. actual kilometers travelled and missed visits.

Typical Phases of Implementation

• Cutting of territories . The universe of outlets is divided into areas to be allocated to sales and/or marketing representatives in such a way that: each representative gets approximately the same amount of work, the territory is as close as possible to the representatives home and any restrictions on which outlets must be visited by which customer are observed.
• Creation of daily routes within territories. Once the territories have been created the outlets must be divided into daily routes, such that each route is optimized and so that the outlets are visited at the correct frequency. If for example there are some outlets that must be visited once a week and some that are visited once every four weeks, then we need to create 20 routes (5 a week for 4 weeks) indicating which outlets the representative must visit and in what sequence on each day of the 20 day cycle.
• Daily auditing of route compliance. The first two phases can be considered strategic in that they need only be done once or twice a year. The final phase is the daily comparison of the representatives activities with his (or her) plan. This will be done in FLO by comparing the route taken (through tracking integration) with the planned route. The idea is that each area manager will be responsible for auditing the representatives under his control.