Trimble, Sunnyvale, Calif., has introduced a new cloud-based field service solution to manage fleet productivity for the GeoManager WorkManagement, the company’s software solution that provides on-demand visibility into vehicle and mobile worker utilization.
For routing, scheduling, and dispatch, Trimble WorkManagement helps organizations to maximize the mobile worker's schedule, provide better customer service, increase productivity, and reduce overall operating costs.
"Our recent research shows that nearly 50 percent of best-in-class field service organizations look to establish better visibility into their field resources as a way to drive more effective scheduling and boost overall service productivity," said Sumair Dutta, senior research analyst for Aberdeen Group. "Since ease of integration is a priority for organizations evaluating field service solutions, the approach of offering scheduling optimization/dispatch, and vehicle tracking in a well-integrated package aligns with market preferences."
The power of WorkManagement can help service-based organizations plan, track, measure, communicate, and execute mobile work. Using intelligent tools, dispatchers can manage a team of mobile workers and monitor their progress against the actual plan for the day in order to effectively resolve daily complications, such as sick drivers, changes to appointment times, emergency trips or route overruns.
"Leveraging a cloud-based environment allows organizations of all sizes to easily deploy scheduling and dispatch solutions without the upfront deployment costs of an IT infrastructure," said Bryn Fosburgh, vice president of Trimble Mobile Solutions. "In addition, Trimble WorkManagement is unique because it visually depicts the real-time impact of changing schedules. When facts are presented, our customers can make informed decisions and better manage incremental jobs to streamline their operations."
Work Advisor and In-day Planner enables rapid response for communicating at-risk tasks as well as delivering the tools to re-optimize routes and workload. The component helps increase mobile worrker productivity by providing visibility to arrival time, distance travelled, stops made, and overtime; reduce travel time and lower fuel costs through route optimization; improve efficiency by comparing planned vs. actual work done per day; and improve quality of service by adjusting schedules and reassigning work.
WorkManagement Mobile allows improved communication between drivers and dispatchers by providing electronic dispatch capabilities. Organizations can use a variety of browser-based smart phones, tablets and ruggedized PDAs to deliver information to the mobile workforce to help ensure work progresses as planned and appointments are not missed. The Mobile feature also allows mobile workers to use the maps on the smart phone to access driving directions to appointments, which can help cut driving time and reduce late or missed appointments.
Performance Manager provides real-time analysis of the mobile work status to help keep customer commitments on track.
Fleet Management assists in managing overall mobile worker productivity using the Trimble GeoManager platform.
Web services allow for integration with third-party systems, such as Microsoft Dynamic’s CRM, to exchange task and service activity information with WorkManagement solution. The optional web services component provides an interoperable link between different software applications running on a variety of platforms.
WorkManagement has an early access program in which the solution is available to existing Trimble fleet management customers. WorkManagement and the optional Web Services component are expected to be available in the second quarter of 2011.
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