September 2002

In a novel bid to automate the scheduling of its 450 field service engineers' journeys without introducing a whole new software system, national consumer electronics specialist Endeva has adapted its existing implementation of the TruckStops routing and scheduling system.

Endeva was created following the merger of the TV rental operations of Thorn and Granada, and is now a leading player in fulfilment and servicing for consumer electronics and household appliances. It operates from 22 regional bases, and introduced TruckStops to schedule delivery journeys from them back in the late 1990s.

Previously call handlers at Endeva's national call centre in Swindon optimised engineers' schedules manually. The key to the new approach has been to log visits by operating centre instead ofassigning them to a specific engineer, and feed them to TruckStops for automatic, optimal scheduling.

The Bristol operations centre has been chosen for the initial trial, and UK TruckStops agent Kingswood MapMechanics team helped Endeva to set up the pilot implementation.

 

According to Steve Fenney, Endeva's IT manager: "TruckStops is particularly well-specified for this application, since it is capable of producing schedules where each driver starts and finishes at a different location. Since our engineers work from home, it was essential for us to have that ability."

Once schedules are calculated, journey instructions are relayed directly to engineers' portable computers via a GSM-based data transfer system.