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5 reasons to plan the routes of your maintenance technicians in-house

Published on 3 April 2019 • Reading time: 6 min read

For several weeks now, fuel prices have been hitting record highs. Technicians often spend half their working day travelling, and there is no prospect of lower prices in the near future. As a result, operations managers are looking for ways to optimise the trips made by mobile workers, and thus reduce their fuel consumption. Fortunately, artificial intelligence is now making it possible to develop particularly interesting tools for optimising the planning of maintenance and repair operations, while meeting the expectations of customers and teams in the field.
Here are 5 reasons to adopt a route scheduling and optimisation software to manage your business and your technicians.

Table of contents

1. Scheduling balanced maintenance routes
2. Limiting the number of kilometres travelled by technicians between stops
3. Enabling customers to book appointments 24/7
4. Reducing the number of missed appointments
5. Making it easier to write service reports

Faced with rising fuel costs, it’s essential to schedule efficient maintenance routes. This saves on trips and boosts technician performance. Optimised service planning also improves customer satisfaction.

1. Scheduling balanced maintenance routes

There are many settings that operations managers must take into account when planning maintenance routes:

• Skills and qualifications of each service technician.
• Load capacity, engine and costs of each vehicle.
• Working hours, required breaks, holidays and sick leave of employees.
• Place of departure and arrival of each vehicle.
• Loading and unloading of equipment.
• Opening hours or availability of the end customer.
• Guaranteed response time.
• Duration of maintenance operations, especially on machine tools, industrial installations or telecommunication and energy distribution networks.
• Usual traffic conditions.

Determining the best routes by integrating all these factors is a real headache! Scheduling these routes by hand, or even using tools such as Google Maps or Excel, is not an efficient way to manage your business: wasted time, missed appointments, delays, upset customers, exhausted technicians, etc.

Good news: maintenance route optimisation software has been designed to manage these constraints. In concrete terms, thanks to algorithms and artificial intelligence, the route optimisation tool assigns maintenance operations to technicians in a few seconds according to the time and business constraints defined by the scheduler.

Maintenance routes generated on AntsRoute.

2. Limiting the number of kilometres travelled by technicians between stops

“The best waste is the waste we don’t produce”. For several years, the zero waste movement, which aims to reduce the waste of resources, has become more and more important in every aspect of our daily lives. The home service sector is no exception…
The route optimisation software is also based on the idea that the best mileage is the one that is not travelled. The objective of these tools is therefore to assign maintenance or repair operations according to business constraints, while minimising the kilometres travelled between two maintenance steps. For this purpose, route optimisation software offers several features:

• At the time of planning the routes, avoid the usual traffic jams.
• When assigning steps to field technicians, take into account the geographical distance from customers.
• If the technician lives in the immediate working area, schedule the start of the route from his home address.
• In the case of unforeseen events or last-minute requests, recalculate the routes to avoid unnecessary kilometres.
• If repair operations require the use of equipment, maximise the loading rate of vehicles to limit returns to the office.

The optimisation of two service routes on AntsRoute.

3. Enabling customers to book appointments 24/7

The use of a route optimisation solution is also interesting for your customers, as the tool is available 24/7. In general, customers want to contact your customer service department to schedule an appointment during their free time, i.e. outside your opening hours. To meet this issue, some publishers offer online appointment scheduling systems. Let’s take the example of vientchezvous.com, the tool offered by AntsRoute:

• The customers can choose a type of service among those you have defined from the platform, for example, maintenance on a machine-tool, installation of an air conditioning system, installation of an electric meter, etc.
• Depending on the type of service, the customer is given an estimated time of visit.
• Then, the customer selects the date of visit and a time slot of availability.
• There are other options available. For example, you can determine a maximum number of kilometres allowed to add a task or custom fields that your customers will have to fill in when making an appointment.

The AntsRoute interface, enabling customers to schedule a service appointment.

4. Reducing the number of missed appointments

The unexpected absence of a customer during an appointment wastes considerable energy and money for service professionals: unnecessary kilometres travelled, frustrated technicians, equipment stored until the next visit, etc. To reduce the number of missed appointments, route optimisation software offers several solutions:

• An email or text message notification system is used to confirm the date and time of the technician’s visit to the customer. For example, sending a link that allows the customer to confirm or reschedule the appointment himself. In case of unforeseen events, the customer can click on this link to choose a new time slot.
• Furthermore, you can trigger a notification with the ETA (estimated time of arrival) 24 hours before the appointment. Once the field technician starts his route, you can set up an automated notification with a link allowing the customer to track the arrival of the worker in real time on a map.

AntsRoute link enabling a customer to reschedule a service appointment.

5. Making it easier to write service reports

For most technicians, writing service reports is a time-consuming and tedious task. However, these reports are particularly appreciated by customers and facilitate the billing process. The use of a route optimisation tool allows the automation of this service report. Thanks to the mobile application provided to the technicians, the field data is transferred automatically to the operations manager. In a few seconds, you can edit a report template in AntsRoute.

The manager could include the following data in the service report template:

• ID of the service company — logo, commercial name, registered capital, registration number, postal address, etc.
• Identification of the technician or field worker — last name, first name or vehicle registration.
• Contact details of the customer for whom the service operation was completed.
• Type of service — repairing a dishwasher, checking fire extinguishers, installing an air conditioning system, etc.
• Geographical location of the field service operations.
• Date, time slot and time of the service operation.
• Signature of the end customer.
• Photos taken by the field worker.
• Other custom fields — type of equipment used, quantity of products consumed, comments, advice for use, date of next maintenance operation, etc.

AntsRoute link enabling the customer to download a service report.

In just a few clicks, the information gathered by the field technician can be transformed into a PDF document. In addition, the AntsRoute route optimisation tool makes it possible to include a link to download this service report within a notification sent to the customer by text message or email after the visit of the technician.

Do you want to try our maintenance route planning and optimisation tool in practice? Go to this page to get a free 7-day trial with no commitment!