The world is changing in front of your very eyes – can you see it?  It’s the end of cheap fuel: from $80 a barrel to nearly $160 in the space of a year; a diminishing resource; an environmentally damaging resource; a political resource and one that cannot easily be replaced.

Demand for fuel is out stripping supply and the challenge is what can businesses with teams of field force engineers do about it? You have to be mobile, you have to travel to your customers’ sites, you cannot share transport and public transport would be a nightmare. The problem you face is that you have to use fuel and this article focuses on how you might use less.

There are, of course, several answers to the question of how do you use less fuel: you might use electric vehicles, or use bio-fuels, or use LPG fuels and ultimately when the technology and costs improve you undoubtedly will. This article looks at the intervening years whilst this bleeding edge technology matures.

The simplest answer is to travel fewer miles more slowly and reduce your overall cost. Couple this with better driving skills and you could save circa 20% of your fuel costs. Add to this a better way of getting individual engineers to interact with their customer and you could be onto a winner.

You can also examine the challenge of scheduling your engineering resources more effectively, reducing your mileage, maximising the utilisation of your engineers and improving communications with your customers.

Firstly, let’s look at the typical mobile field engineering fuel costs for a company with 100 vehicles. Let’s assume five jobs a day and a typical round trip of 100 miles for 260 working days of the year for each engineer. Travelling 26,000 miles at 30mpg with fuel at £5 a gallon is £4,333 per annum, or £433,333 for all 100 engineers. A 20% saving would be straight profit of £86,000 per annum. Worth having – definitely!

So the question is: how?

The trouble with most scheduling solutions is that they require expensive map databases to provide the shortest multi-visit trip. Indeed it used to be that their initial cost wouldn’t leave much change out of the 20% figure identified above. Then the internet-based shared mapping resource came along with the appropriate software application to provide this simple trip planning tool at a price of a few pence per trip.

The system works like this: unlike expensive bulk scheduling systems, this system works on your business rules to plan single trips, one at a time, based on an initial milk run principle. It allocates territories to individual engineers, for example, and automatically receives jobs into that territory, allowing them to be individually scheduled. The trip can be planned and viewed across an internet browser, manually manipulated and then published.

A key factor is that the trip is published to a mobile computer in possession of the field engineer, with the ability to track their movements through its built in geo-positioning and also the ability to automatically correspond to the customer expecting the visit. The win-win situation is that the scheduling tool can be flexible, dealing with emergencies.

With new jobs in near real-time as they arrive, you could also reschedule according to your own business rules. It would therefore be possible to keep the job order pool open all day and offer a greater service level to customers. You can provide total visibility to your customers and be responsive to their requirements as and when they change.

To summarise the process, the business application receives jobs, pre-allocates them to a specific territory/engineer based on your own business definable parameters and can then be scheduled to improve productivity and reduce miles travelled. The resulting trip is sent to the engineer’s mobile computer and this is tracked to provide the job status, linked to the customer’s own web portal to provide the communications. The business benefits are real, measurable and directly affect profitability.

Modern solutions don’t cost a lot to implement as they are provided on a pay-as-you-go basis. They are also provided as managed services using specialist providers of computing power, network infrastructure, and/or web visibility. The benefit to their user is significant as the specialist systems management is provided by third parties.

If we look closer at the internet map scheduling solution we need the front end application to take the jobs and schedule them in accordance with the user’s business rules. These jobs can come from a variety of sources including electronic interfaces or links to scheduling tools or they can be entered directly. The scheduling tool will then pre-allocate jobs to specific trips and these can be seen both graphically, superimposed on a map, and simultaneously in a database format.

The management team will be able to review the jobs, prioritise them and eventually send them off to the internet-based scheduling tool to determine the best route and time required. The results will be displayed on a map and the benefits include fewer miles travelled, more productivity and greater ability to talk to customers about time of arrival.

A neat addition to this process is the ability to have a pool of jobs and to produce a pre-plan, passing it to a call centre operator who will then confirm with the customer that they will be in, delaying the job if they aren’t. In this way first time fixes and customer satisfaction increase, revisits are avoided and you do fewer miles.

We have already determined that mobile computing is critical to the process of reducing fuel costs, particularly in checking plans against actual and ensuring benefits (fuel savings) are maximised. There is no point in scheduling least miles if your engineers go off and do their own thing. The mobile computer becomes an integral part of communicating with the customer, validating routes, improving performance and collecting vital management data.

We are all facing increasing fuel prices and if your business relies on travelling to customers, then you will surely want to do something about minimising these costs. Help is at hand – use cost-effective trip scheduling software to reduce the miles you have to drive and get the added bonus of improving customer care at the same time.