Visiting service
without morons

Business processes of any enterprise, which provides visiting service, are similarly organized.
It does not matter if it is a delivery from an Internet-shop, DHL delivery service or home installation of washing machines.
The main characters: a contact-centre which receives the orders from the customers in this or that way, a dispatching group that distributes orders, a warehouse to give away the orders, deliveries or spare parts, a cash-desk or its analogue where the cash from sales is checked to and where the orders fulfilled are closed.
For the sake of simplicity, hereunder we will consider a single case, which is, nevertheless, typical for the model of visiting service.
Particularly, it is so called «computer assistance» that is a repair of the computers and office equipment at the place of the customer.
So, the call-centre receives a call, the request is issued and forwarded to the dispatchers. It is important that the operator of the call-centre receiving a call promises that a service-engineer will arrive at customer’s within 2 hours maximum.
\From the description of the order distribution (below) it is clear that this process is slow, and in some cases it takes dozens of minutes. It is useless to hold the customer on during all this time (moreover, the customer will not do it himself/herself), but to mumble something like «Thank you for your call, we will find a proper engineer and within half an hour call you back and arrange the time of his visit» is also not an option — the customer will simply refuse and will call the competitors. And there really are plenty of them\

The dispatchers, according to their opinion, choose a proper service-engineer, call him and give the order. It is quite typical when the service-engineer is out of reach by phone due to some personal or objective reasons, or he does not want to accept this particular order (it is late, the district is not convenient to get to, today is Friday evening, etc), so several calls are usually to be made to distribute one order.
\Note: This case is a business-model of an urgent service — customers of the computer aid services, as a rule, are not ready to wait for a visit of the service-engineer longer than two hours. For ordinary retailing Internet-shop it is typical to deliver on the next (if it is well-organized) day — in this case the mechanism of routing the deliveries is different, since there is a possibility to collect the requests during the day and in the evening/ at night/ early in the morning to distribute them at once to the couriers/drivers with respect to the territorial sectors as well as mass and size of the load. However, it is a subject for a separate case.\

Let us come back to the process of the requests distribution to the service engineers. It can result in any of the following options:

• The service engineer is found, and it is expected that he will come on time or be insignificantly late. It is an ideal option.
• The service engineer is found, the order is distributed, but it is by no means possible to come on time within the two hours promised. It is necessary to call the customer back and to re-arrange the time. The further ways of the situation development are clear: the customer may refuse, the time of the service engineer visit may not suit him/her, etc. — a range of problems is endless. After that, there goes the reward chain of adventures on re-arrangement of the order with the service engineer. Nevertheless, the positive result (the order is carried out and the customer is happy) is not guaranteed at all.
• For some reasons it is impossible to find a service engineer. It is necessary to call back, refuse from the order and apologize. No comments.

It is already clear from the extremely tiring description that the last thing, which the business working under the above model can die of, is the excess of efficiency.
Endless number of calls and calls back, permanent human factor: «Masha did not say», «Vasya forgot». Due to huge amount of problems with re-arrangements, it is simpler for the dispatcher to assign, in the semi-forced way, the order to the service engineer who does not have a desire or is just too incompetent to do it. The most important is to keep the time.
There is no need to say how this practice influences the quality of works and the satisfaction of the customers.
It also influences the profitability of the business due to the excessiveness of the staff and the abundance of non-productive transactions (and here we reach the famous muda). It is sad as well.

Well, the order is somehow distributed. The service engineer gets to the customer. Let us assume that the technology of the orders distribution worked well and the service-engineer is competent in the characteristics of the customer’s problems. Voila!?
Not necessary.
Despite that each service engineer has an emergency set of tools and the most used space parts, it can happen (and it regularly does) that exactly the spare part which is not included in the emergency set is required. It is necessary to go to the Headquarters, to receive it from the warehouse. Write the steps down, dear reader.
Ok, it is received; the engineer comes back to the customer and fixes the problem. What is then? Visiting the place of the next order? No.
It is necessary to go to the central office to deliver the money received. Otherwise they will not give another order — it is a peculiarity of the Russian market for poorly-paid labor and high staff turnover.
Write, write down the steps.

As a result, if we look at this world’s sadness from the point of view of the process approach and the formation of the added value chain, the only stages from the list of oddities mentioned and the things which really create the value are: a) reception of the call by the operator, b) the work of the service-engineer at the place of failure elimination. And that’s all.
If to estimate the business-process efficiency, averaged with regard to the package of orders, it will be equal to about 3%. Like a train in the second part of the XIX century. And it is without consideration of difficult cases when the repair at the place, actually, is impossible, and the equipment must be delivered to the fixed service-centre of the company and, surely, brought back afterwards.

Dear radio-listeners, you have just seen a «before-picture» of the business process of the Arms from the shoulders «Before», as it can be easily guessed, the introduction of Ultima ERP accompanied by both inevitable and beneficent re-engineering of the company’s business—processes by the business analysts from Ultima Consulting.

And now the «after-pictures».
Receiving a call from the customer, the operator of Ultima call-centre fills in the request form with important details of the order in the program, presses the button «Save» and forgets. Fire&Forget.
The order goes into the system of automated distribution. From the file of the service engineers’ competences, registered by this moment online, the system selects those meeting the order demands and sends SMS-info with the order parameters. The first service-engineer who answers the SMS receives the order. Until capture of the order, each SMS addressee and the happy holder of the order at any time before it is closed (the order, not the happy holder) has a possibility to listen to a talk between the customer and the operator by calling from his/her own mobile phone to the office phone number and having introduced the number of the order.
If within a certain period of time (it is calculated by the system on the basis of the pre-assigned business-logic, depending on the time, the day of the week, the amount of the service engineers online, etc) the order is not taken, the system sends SMS-2. The capture of the order via SMS-2 provides the service engineer with the increased percent from the order. So, a sub-sort of the logic at the Dutch auction vice versa is implemented— if the order is not taken at once, it means that the conditions are not attractive enough and the wage must be increased.
There can be any number of such cycles. In real practice, if the service engineers refuse to capture the order after SMS-2, the order is escalated to the dispatcher who solves the problem.
Please, pay attention to the difference from the «before-pictures»: in the first case 100% of the orders got to the dispatcher and 30-40% of them passed through him/her two and more times. The corresponding indices of «after»: 5-8%, the reception of the order by the dispatcher again is an exceptional case.
So, the service-engineers take about 95% of the orders voluntarily (and quickly! If you are a bit late, the order will go to a faster colleague). It is easy to guess how it improves the quality of work and the satisfaction level of the customers, with all ensuing consequences.

Let us continue.
Let us consider the situation when the required spare part is not included in the emergency set. The service engineer goes to any nearby shop (there are more than enough computer shops in Moscow) and buys what he needs. There is NO NEED to go back to the office.

The order is fulfilled, the money is received. The service engineer closes the order himself/herself through the Ultima ERP web-interface (from the customer’s computer or from his/her phone through the mobile version of the web-interface). The spare parts bought independently are accounted and written off in the order at the same time. To put it short, there is NO NEED to go back to the office.

The only thing left to do is to deliver the money. The service engineer goes to the closest branch of Alfa-Bank (there are a lot of them too), deposits the money through the cash machine, sends SMS with the details of the receipt to the office number, the system recognizes the payment and credits it in the background to the client account of the service-engineer. There is NO NEED to go back to the office.

And now a real voila!

The result.
Efficiency of the service engineers’ labor in the terms of the number of visits per day and profit per a person has increased 2.5 times.
Staff turnover of the service engineers has decreased three times — the direct and indirect expenditures for employment and training new staff has decreased essentially, the level of general competence among service engineers staff has increased sharply.
The amount of the customers’ complaints related to non-keeping the time for visits and periods of problem removal has decreased 8 times.
The staff of dispatchers has been cut three times — from 5 to 1 person (according to a famous joke about the Estonian «there was no sense for fewer»)
The load of the call-centre operators with so-called «non-targeted» calls (when a person phones back «Where is my service engineer? Three hours ago you promised he would come in two hours!», etc) has decreased to the level of statistical uncertainty.
It is obvious that the morale of the employee has grown up — it is pleasant for everybody to be aware that he/she does not work in the office of Nikanor but for the technological leader of the market. People get inspired when they hear «thank you» for their work.

Something like that.In general, if you want to have ERP system which will lead your business ten (minimum) levels higher and will bring real measurable return — then, welcome.
If you like hearing marketing brainwashing from the thimble riggers of SAP-type and paying a lot of millions for the soft, in comparison with which the first version of Tetris is like a spacecraft in front of the cart... It is, more probably, a doctor’s concern... But not ours, for sure.