Anglian Water has reported a marked increase in operational efficiency through a radical overhaul of workforce planning systems, geared to matching human capital requirements more closely to demand. Work backlog has been reduced ‘by up to 95 per cent in some areas’, the company has reported, while overtime bills have been cut by 11 per cent.
Key to the revamp was centralisation and automation of workforce planning in which 170 back-office staff have to schedule 1,180 field engineers on more than one million jobs a year.
Prior to the reform, engineers in the small teams responsible for water treatment, network distribution and so on would have to spend time at the end of each working day talking with regional schedulers, and sometimes have significant waiting times getting through. Disparate regional reporting systems meant that there was no central overview matching skills supply to demand. This made it difficult to predict resource requirements for future repair, new build and maintenance projects.
Simon White, business readiness manager at Anglian Water, says: ‘We needed a lot more clarity on what field engineers did and where they did it. We needed to improve customer service by reacting very quickly to customers’ needs. We need to make sure we had the right staff available at the right time at the right place.’
Since automation in 2006, Anglian Water is now able ‘to schedule engineers, analyse work trends, forecast future demand and plan resources accordingly’, the company reports.
Schedules are now based upon many complex variables such as an engineer’s location, skill set, current job and the tools they carry with them. They spend more time maintaining or repairing assets as average travel per job 'is down 24 per cent'.
David Cooke, director of water services Anglian Water, reports: ‘We have also eliminated technicians arriving on the job with the wrong skills, tools or materials because of better planning, scheduling and deployment.’
Engineers no longer have to visit a depot or headquarters each morning; they log on to find out their first assignment of the day.
The technology used in the automation consisted of a range of products provided by ClickSoftware, while project management was run jointly by Anglian, ClickSoftware and the Computer Sciences Corporation.