Today's service organisations seem confused about what productivity is and how to increase it - despite achieving four or five new calls per day, per engineer, many companies can still only measure 45% productivity or less. Even those organisations that perceive themselves as high performers can still create a step change in productivity. In reality, the majority of service operations fail to re-deploy existing and available manpower resources to resolve potential demand peaks, using overtime or contractors to overcome the consequences of inefficiency. So how to unravel the productivity challenge?

Put in its simplest terms, productivity is 'doing more with the same' or 'doing the same with less', while still achieving contractual obligations. Failure to achieve optimum productivity may result from weak operational forecasting or planning, the failure of field engineers to achieve expected output, ineffective scheduling, or any number of other issues that impede performance.
Service management systems still consistently fail to track the measurements that enable the effective evaluation of performance or identification of performance inhibitors. Without effective standards, simple key ratio comparisons can not be undertaken; managers at every level of the service organisation stumble on, uninformed and powerless to institute true productivity improvement.
Many organisations view process re-engineering as the route to introducing performance improvements - methodologies such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) are all about structure and process engineering - but without effective controls even the best process in the world is worthless. Before exploring the key processes of call handling, call management or logistics ordering, the first step for the service organisation is to fully understand its business. What is the profile of work coming into the various areas by volume and type, when does it arrive and how does it translate into manpower requirements?

On the journey towards performance improvement, the initial objective is to initially determine the start point - where is the organisation in terms of current performance? Many service organisations find this difficult to undertake because they have no standards with which to measure current performance against. Instead, they resort to benchmarking against 'similar' organisations; when result comparisons are not in their favour, they try to justify the reasons for the variances.

The creation of work and performance standards is critical, providing a base from which to drive productivity. Standards provide the measurement criteria for productivity comparisons and also act as the basis for building a forecast. Standards should be developed for every area of the operation; especially critical is the core field engineering standards - job travel times and work times - for every type of call.

Creating and defining these standards in conjunction with engineers will enhance acceptance, and change managers should use observation in the field to validate these standards if necessary. Once established and acknowledged by engineers, any job that takes longer than the set agreed standard provides an opportunity to identify what hampered a field engineer's performance - missing or incorrect information, parts arriving late or not at all - and to resolve these issues.
The management operating system should be designed around a simple forecast, plan, action and report model. Forecasting centres upon using historical information to create a master schedule, using information from sales and account teams to integrate any known or planned changes. This information helps the management team to determine the potential volume and type of calls, while an analysis of job standards is used to create a 'weighted' average call.

In effect the number of engineers required to service the forecasted business is driven by the volume of work together with the targeted level of performance (utilisation, effectiveness and productivity) and customer target service level agreements (SLAs). The master schedule flows into a detailed plan, broken down by month, week and day and incorporating other key activity inputs such as holidays, sickness and training.

On a daily and even job-by-job basis, actual performance can be evaluated against planned performance using indicators such as availability, utilisation, effectiveness and productivity to identify variances. It is this 'short interval' control that provides the mechanism with which continuous improvement can take place; reporting becomes a process of identifying how well the operation performed against how it said it would perform. This reporting and analysis is undertaken on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Encouraging active management behaviours can empower personnel across the organisation. For example, daily 15 minute review meetings between logistics, call management and field engineering teams enables the open assessment of previous day performance, the investigation and discussion of issues, the resolution of local issues at a local level and the escalation of non-resolvable issues up the management chain. It also means current or future 'show-stoppers' can be identified and appropriate action taken.

By setting unambiguous performance targets, personnel are encouraged to identify 'off-plan' scenarios and to actively manage these. If over capacity means daily productivity is reduced, teams are driven to offer available resources to other teams, and to do this immediately the requirement is identified. This generates a daily flow of resource across the organisation, effectively utilising capacity where the business needs it most and resolving the need for overtime or contract labour. The call management function effectively drives field engineering behaviours and performance.

By closely defining roles and responsibilities, the first level management tiers - team leaders, supervisors and schedulers - are encouraged to become active managers, escalating issues that cannot be resolved on a daily basis to weekly and monthly meetings. This ensures that service directors become aware of key issues impacting performance.

A further benefit of this approach is that field engineers clearly comprehend that factual ratio comparisons demonstrate with clarity situations of overwork; it also enables them to escalate to schedulers any process issues that impact delivery in the field. As organisational improvement continues, engineers observe that their ability to deliver against plan is enhanced and goal achievement is recognised and valued.

Today's service organisations frequently equate being 'busy' with being 'productive' and inherent management practices and financial reporting help to confirm this opinion. In reality most service organisations encourage passive management behaviours, with a focus on administration, reporting and working around issues rather than resolving them. Because many service organisations are unaware of their true performance potential (because they lack the measurements to define this), they are unable to institute true performance improvement.

Today's service organisations often invest heavily in service management or mobile data systems to resolve performance issues; yet this investment does nothing to address productivity measurement or management practices and simply leads to the automation of existing poor processes.

Prior to instituting new systems or automation, many organisations would gain greater value from evaluating where they stand, in terms of current performance. Creating a plan, based on clearly defined standards, enables an operation to identify non value-added activities and duplications in process flows. Clarification of roles and responsibilities gives personnel across the organisation clear direction on performance targets while instituting a powerful management operating system - with daily review meetings and assessment of performance against plan - empowers every level of management to become active in identifying issues and off-plan scenarios.
Management by ratio, rather than absolute numbers, effectively releases the service organisation so it can achieve the goal of continual performance improvement.