November 2002

If you're arranging visits by a field service team, how do you ensure from minute to minute that you're instructing them to attend to the most urgent calls first? That is to say, the ones where you're committed to the most stringent service level agreements (SLA) with your customers?

a.p.solve, a company specialising in intelligent field force management, claims to have come up with the answer. It has launched a new module called Taskforce Intelligent Appointer as part of its Taskforce Enterprise system, and says it is the first solution that allows users to provide their customers with a choice of appointments based on SLA information. It measures the availability of appointments against the cost of their delivery, and yet, the company claims, does not degrade the underlying schedule.

Taskforce itself uses inbound, real-time information to organise mobile workers' daily activity. Patented technologies based on artificial intelligence automatically deal on a dynamic basis with a complex mix of planned, reactive and demand-driven work orders. The result, says the company, is to optimise the coordination of each job's location with the skills of the mobile workforce.

a.p.solve has links with BT. It is described as being "in incubation" with BTexact Technologies, a division of BT which develops advanced communication technologies both for BT and for external businesses. Technically it comes under the wing of Brightstar, BT's "corporate incubator".