Accenture Field Force Transformation

Accenture Field Force Transformation

What holds your field service workers back? Overcoming Frequent Field Force Challenges Many organizations have invested in office-based workforce management systems to automate work allocation, asset management, and customer service and billing. Too often, however, field force workers cannot access this information from the field. As a result, they continue to rely on paper-based or offline systems, and access critical information only when at a service center or field depot. Enter field force transformation. By bringing technician-focused tools to the field and re-engineering frontline-service business practices, organizations can: Provide real-time intelligence: Give dispatchers better information about technicians status and location, to revise job allocations on the fly and quickly address availability shortages, outages or unplanned work. Extend the back office: Make the field force more flexible by providing both technicians and supervisors with access to information from back-end work and asset management systems, supporting faster, more informed and more effective decision-making in the field. Deploy supervisors: Enable supervisors to escape the office and bring their expertise on-site to improve job quality, by providing them with mobile tools for monitoring field technicians work schedule and status in real time. Reduce travel time: Send technicians straight from their home to a job site, rather than requiring them to collect printed work orders and documentation at a depot or regional office, then having to return again to submit job completion details and time sheets. Capture once: Provide field technicians with systems that capture and validate data while at a work site, which helps to eliminate the time, cost and potential errors of using paper forms to capture data in the field. Increase flexibility: Remove artificial constraints imposed on the structure of the workforce by legacy mobile solutions working in silos. Improving an enterprise s field force productivity has a direct and positive impact on the bottom line. Indeed, according to Aberdeen Group 1, bestin-class service organizations earn 26-percent profit margins (compared with 15 percent for the typical firm), maintain much higher service-level agreement rates and can bill their customers far more quickly, helping to improve their cash flow. By extending the back-office to their field force, organizations can also increase service profitability by an average of 17 percent. In short, optimizing field service processes helps organizations remain not only efficient, but competitive. 2

Accenture s Field Force Transformation Solutions Accenture helps organizations achieve high performance by transforming their field force capabilities to cost-effectively increase productivity while improving customer service. Field Force Transformation focuses on improving the efficiency of a distributed field force through a variety of techniques, including: Business process re-engineering: Which business changes will most enhance technician performance and supervisor effectiveness? Cultural change: What cultural adjustments are required to encourage people to change and what is the best way to inspire and train them to use new processes and tools? Organizational structure: Do current roles and responsibilities inside the organization align with the new business objectives? Is your existing technology a barrier to achieving the right structure? Performance management: Do technicians and supervisors have the right incentives, backed by clearly defined goals, and is the organization maximizing its ability to capture all potential business? Technology: What is the best way to apply technology and tools, including workforce management software, to better schedule and dispatch technicians, control inventory and invoicing, and maximize the potential work captured in the field? Benefits Accenture s Field Force Transformation practice allows your organization to capitalize on Accenture s extensive field-service experience and deliver a number of benefits, including: Better productivity Leading companies optimize their field service operations to increase profitability. No wonder: For most organizations with engineers in the field, labor costs typically represent the largest part of operating expense. As a result, the imperative is to do more with what you have by controlling labor costs as well as to increase field force productivity, by giving service technicians the tools they need to better order parts, invoice customers and provide effective service. Increased efficiency More than ever, creating shareholder value means rethinking efficiency. With better business practices and tools (such as field force scheduling), and information sharing providing technicians with real-time access to everything from parts inventory and customer history to asset service manuals and diagnostic tools organizations can minimize the time and expense required to provide high quality service. Improving customer service Customers are demanding tighter appointment windows and faster resolution times. The internet has not only provided customers access to much more information about service providers performance records as well as other consumers perceptions; but also makes it easier for consumers to switch to alternative service providers. Improving your customer service in the field can help differentiate your organization in a competitive environment. Regulatory compliance Complying with regulations, and documenting that compliance, is now a fact of life in many industries. Field force technology supports your organization s efforts to demonstrate how it s meeting or exceeding these requirements, and helps confirm that the underlying reporting requirements don t compromise field force efficiency. Creating new revenue streams through service Forward-looking organizations are transforming their service offerings from cost centers into profit centers by using the field force to not just provide service, but also to cross-sell and up-sell other products and services. Many have also created the role of chief service officer (CSO) to keep the service business accountable to the board as well as to help maximize its revenue growth. Field Force Transformation Bottom-Line Benefits Many of our Field Force Transformation programs have allowed organizations to achieve savings of 45 to 80 minutes of extra work per person per day. For a typical service organization with 1,000 field workers, this could result in up to $20 million in annual savings. 2

Why Accenture? Since the mid-1990s, Accenture has been helping clients to maximize the efficiency of their field service operations. Since that time, Accenture has completed more than 100 workforce management implementations in numerous serviceoriented industries around the world. Accenture supports not only the development and implementation of best-in-class workforce management technology, but has helped develop the industry-leading tools, business practices and field force methodologies that organizations require to transform their field service organizations into high performers. Benefits in just six to nine months With more than 1,500 field force practitioners, Accenture brings the skills and deep industry experience required to rapidly transform your business and achieve results often in just six to nine months. Accenture supports clients throughout the entire lifecycle of their Field Force Transformation program, including: Formulating transformation strategies and business cases Understanding how field service differs by industry from utilities and telecommunications to industrial equipment and computer services to apply leading practices Implementing and integrating workforce management technology Delivering application maintenance and operational (including help desk) support Accenture complements its industryleading experience in field force transformation and mobile solutions for its enterprise clients around the globe with a vendor-neutral approach to selecting best-in-class technology based on each organization s needs. Accenture also collaborates with a range of technology organizations, including our mobile alliance partners Sybase and Click. Capabilities Mobile Center of Excellence This center offers offshore technical experts with extensive functional workforce management implementation experience across multiple industries and technologies. As part of the Accenture Global Delivery Network, this center allows Accenture to quickly bring project resources to bear, apply and adapt leading business practices to suit an organization s needs and deliver cost-effective solutions. Accenture Managed Field Force Service Designed for organizations with 500 1,500 technicians, but capable of handling many more, Accenture Managed Field Force Service (AMFFS) is Accenture s hosted, software as a service (SaaS)-based, workforce management application. The service is delivered for a per-technician, per-month service fee, and includes workforce management software, devices, network connectivity, hosting, 3

application maintenance and help desk. This service can be deployed in as little as 4-8 weeks and allows organizations to lower their field force operating costs, increase technician productivity and enhance customer satisfaction. Premium Technical Services Accenture offers an on demand PC-based remote support capability backed by patented technology to enable technical service organizations to optimize their service quality and expand their customer offerings. The solution supports numerous services, including PC problem diagnosis, advanced repair, optimization, configuration, installations, upgrades and operating system reinstalls. This can be used across multiple customer channels, including call center up-selling, product differentiation, online self-service and on-site support. It reduces handling time, infrastructure support costs and resource utilization challenges, resulting in fewer callbacks and happier customers. Enabling Transformation with Workforce Management Solutions The opportunity: To achieve the benefits of a field force solution without the traditional complexity, cost and management overhead. Historically, workforce management systems have required high initial capital investments, relied on proprietary hardware and software, sometimes failed to deliver reliable mobile network connectivity or access to critical business information, and faced limited integration with mission-critical (for the field) backoffice systems. The landscape is changing. The cost of mobile and handheld devices, as well as high-speed network subscriptions, is plummeting. And, the emergence of cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) applications have driven a new class of workforce management solution that is quicker and easier to configure, integrate and implement. Which solution is best? With so many competing vendors, standards, technologies and products, Accenture helps field force organizations navigate the confusion and the hype, enabling them to understand: What mobile platform is best for their organization? Which vendors will likely still be financially viable in 3-5 years? What technologies may be obsolete in a year? How to quantify and achieve the benefits that a field force transformation investment should deliver? How to best migrate from a landscape of mixed legacy mobile systems to a new platform and strategy? 4

Delivering Field Force Success Telstra Accenture helped Telstra Corporation Ltd, Australia s leading telecommunications and information services company, boost the effectiveness of its field technicians by improving its automated tools and related processes. Enhancing the technology environment both hardware and applications within the vehicles that about 5,000 technicians use in their daily work has led to new capabilities such as an automated ability to test lines, the integration of GPS navigation in work ticket information and the maintenance of the work history on the mobile device. The program has contributed to a 50% improvement in field workforce productivity. Virgin Media Accenture worked with Virgin Media, the UK s leading entertainment and communications company, and several other vendors to deliver a unified solution for about 2,500 mobile technicians to enhance their communication capabilities and help smoothly integrate the existing Accenture-delivered VM Mobile Workforce system with a new automated routing engine. As a result, Virgin Media was able to increase the efficiency of its field force and back-office support, as well as provide remote field workers better communications channels. TELUS Accenture led the assessment and strategy to bring a new workforce management approach for about 2,000 consumer-facing technicians at this major Canadian telecommunications company. Accenture designed the solution s functionality, helped redesign the processes to support the workforce management solution as well as overall program management and training for the solution s implementation. The new workforce management platform provides enhanced capabilities to support a customer-centric service model that will let customers self-schedule appointments at times they prefer and then check on the status of that appointment in realtime. When implemented, this solution is expected to improve operational performance by as much as 20%. And a standardized enterprise IT solution set will reduce overall IT costs and decrease time to market in support of new product and service launches. 5

National Grid Accenture helped National Grid, one of the world s largest utilities, implement an innovative mobile program to provide the more than 900 field workers access to essential office information resources. The new system schedules work to field force staff from a central planning function, returning asset and condition data to the central systems and databases. The solution replaced the use of paper forms with electronic forms featuring automated capabilities, eliminating time wasted on trips back to the office to collect and return paperwork. As part of a major transformation of their Work and Asset Management processes, the mobile solution helped National Grid to increase maintenance staff productivity by 25% and reduce the back office planning and scheduling effort by 40%. The solution is hosted and supported by the Accenture Application Management team in the UK. This team is responsible for the day to day maintenance of the Accenture hosted applications including the core Office in the Hand application, the scheduling application and the application used to remotely manage software versions on mobile devices. In the Office in the Hand program, Accenture delivered a solution which addressed a challenging set of workforce management requirements for a complex organization. With Accenture s help, National Grid has extended and evolved the solution as these requirements changed, and Accenture continues to provide services and support to National Grid for workforce management. Mike Hardman, Portfolio Lead - Global Asset Management, Transmission - IS National Grid 6

About Accenture Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 181,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$21.58 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2009. Its home page is www.accenture.com. 1 Source: Trends in Mobile Field Service: Empowering your field technicians to deliver better, faster service (Aberdeen Group, June 2009) Copyright 2010 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture. Contact To find out more about Accenture s Field Force Transformation capabilities, contact: Ankur Mathur Ankur.Mathur@accenture.com 8