Increasing mobile engineer productivity

As labour costs rise, it’s no wonder FM companies are looking hard than ever at mobile engineer productivity.

The question is, at what are we looking?  Speeding things up or doing things right?

Imagine two people do a journey every day from A to B and it takes them 30 minutes.  What they both don’t realise is they aren’t taking the quickest route.  They need to get there faster so one invests in a faster car.  Sure, they save a few minutes and do the journey in 26 minutes.  However, the other looks at the route, realises there is a quicker way and does the journey in 20 minutes.  This person hasn’t spent as much and they’ve achieved more.  Of course, the faster car down the quicker route is the ultimate!

The Faster Car vs. The Quicker Route

Huge monetary investments are being made in new systems for mobile workforces, large amounts of time invested in deployment, and months of teething issues are being borne with, only for some implementations to fail.  Admittedly, some systems can make some good improvements to the speed things are done by improving communication to real-time and dashboards and so on.  But if the fundamental errors and way of doing things are still happening, we are only speeding up our error-making, or doing the wrong things faster.  This is simply a faster car doing the same route.

It’s time to rethink how things are done in the FM sector.  Arguably, it is more important to ensure the right things are being done before speeding up.

What is the quicker route for the FM sector?

The utopia in the FM sector is that engineers spend 100% of their time on sites and 0% of their time travelling or collecting.  At this stage, this isn’t totally possible, but there is huge amounts of wasted resources in a typical engineer day:

• How long do your engineers spend collecting materials from wholesalers?  (The typical mobile engineer is estimated to spend around 250hrs collecting per yr).
• How many failed visits do you get because materials are wrong or damaged?
• How many miles are travelled by engineers going around collecting materials?
• How much time do your admin teams spend chasing materials and planning jobs?
• How many orders aren’t ready for collection in full or on time?

RLT Group delivers lighting, electrical and compliance materials direct to sites that engineers are working on via the simplyonsite system.  This unique and innovative system overcomes the typical challenges FM companies face with direct to site delivery such as late deliveries, deliveries going missing, incomplete orders, lack of communication, carriage charges and so on giving some of our existing clients savings in excess of seven digits annually.

It’s not rocket science but with labour cost being 60-80% of service delivery and parts cost being 20-40%, RLT Group focuses on making engineers more productive, knowing that the results from that are much more significant, especially in a labour cost inflating period, than focusing on the product alone.  This surely is the quicker route.

Practically, what can I expect from the simplyonsite system?

Some of the benefits that existing clients enjoy from the simplyonsite system are as follows:

• Delivery systems that get materials direct to engineers without them having to waste time or fuel, maximising onsite time.
• Contract stocking of materials for specific clients of yours.  We even partner with some manufacturers to distribute materials for contracts across the UK.
• Real-time communication for admin teams and engineers eliminates failed visits and keeps everyone in the loop on when materials will be on site.
• Bespoke reporting on contracts allows you to manage spend, specification and jobs.
• Auto approvals put checks and balances on spend limits to ensure that engineers can order directly but it won’t go until approved by the specified manager.
• Live price book system eliminates invoicing errors, dramatically speeds up accounting and ensures you never pay a penny more than you agreed right across the UK real-time.
• Access to the simplyonsite app gives you a unique tool to help engineers requisition, get jobs to them and even manage waste.

This top-level working together in synergy ensures you are going the quickest route to the end goal of serving your client, using your resources most efficiently and effectively whilst improving client satisfaction.

Once this is in place, and only then, is it worth investing in systems to speed processes up even further.

Why not speak to one of our consultants today to see how you can dramatically boost engineer productivity and reduce operational costs?