Service Guarantee

Mar 15, 2001 12:00 PM, John Lee

Internet and wireless service-management technology can give you the tools to use in fulfilling service-level agreements.

New applications combining the latest Internet and wireless technologies could help carriers improve their ability to view, measure, contract for and profitably deliver service-level agreements (SLAs). With many SLAs now providing substantial penalties for relative brief outages, prioritizing the response of the service organization based on SLA requirements and other customer entitlements has never been more important.

M-commerce and a dramatic increase in network outsourcing has brought more attention to the value of SLAs as a means of ensuring optimal performance of the enterprise network and the associated mission-critical applications. Companies running large m-commerce sites, for example, require guarantees that their sites will remain up and running at all times.

SLAs meet this need by providing a guaranteed level of service, usually with a fairly substantial financial penalty if the carrier fails to meet the requirement. But a well-thought-out SLA also can be a valuable marketing tool for the carrier; making it possible to charge more for services that are guaranteed and performance verifiable. By monitoring the service levels, carriers can go a step farther by bundling service offerings with performance guarantees at differing levels of performance and cost, differentiating themselves from the competition. Finally, strong SLA-measurement capabilities can assist carriers in setting concrete limitations on offerings to avoid signing up for unrealistic agreements that would be technically impossible or too expensive to deliver.

SLAs’ Challenge

The increasing use of SLAs provides a considerable challenge for the wireless carrier. The financial costs incurred by a company that cannot meet its SLA commitments can be very steep. In an extreme example, the penalty may be three times the monthly recurring charges for each hour service is down after the first. Then, if service were down for 13 hours, the penalty for the outage would be a service credit equal to 36 months of revenue. With this type of penalty, it’s critical to ensure that the right priority is attached to servicing this account.

Service managers will be forced to consider SLA commitments when making operational deployment decisions, in effect creating a strategy of penalty avoidance. Additional capabilities and resources may be necessary to ensure adequate response coverage; parts or personnel may be pre-positioned at or near the customer’s facility, and the dispatchers need immediate alert notification of the entitlement in order to give these lines special attention.

But traditional workforce-management methods have significant disadvantages in addressing the issues posed by SLAs. One problem is that they rely upon the dispatcher to identify and prioritize service jobs that involve SLAs. When the number of SLAs is small, it may be relatively easy for the dispatcher to track them. But as the number of agreements with varying levels of penalties arises, it becomes humanly impossible to try to balance the resulting conflicts in priority. It’s easy for calls involving SLAs to be assigned the wrong priority or even to slip through the cracks and go into the queue of ordinary assignments.

Even when the SLA entitlement is immediately recognized, it’s often difficult to determine what actions should be taken. That’s because dispatchers have difficulty in determining where each field engineer is, what he is doing and whether he has the skills and parts needed to address the high-priority job. In many cases, field engineers have relatively little contact with dispatchers after they receive their assignments for the day. Normally, the only way to find a field engineer is by calling him on a cellular phone. But this can be time consuming, especially when the number of field engineers is high. Even when you can reach the field engineer, he may not know whether or not he has the required parts unless he goes out and searches through his truck.

Appropriate Response

The new generation of field-service management systems offers the ability to overcome these problems and greatly improve the ability to fulfill SLAs. Automating the process of responding to SLAs ensures that resources are prioritized with the goal of avoiding financial penalties or other criteria specified by the user. Business rules are employed to ensure a more efficient response that prioritizes the service calls. The server software, known as the service hub, can match the customer entitlements against the location, capabilities and the status of each member of the service organization. It then searches for, identifies and dispatches field engineers based on pre-set business criteria. The system also can provide notification to managers under pre-identified circumstances automatically, such as when a field engineer has not been dispatched to a customer holding a platinum SLA within 10 minutes of receiving the call.

The service field engineer can acknowledge or reject the call and record a reason for the rejection. Having accepted a call, the field engineer can report work against it such as travel, labor and wait times. The system automatically tracks arrival and departure times and downtime. The field engineer also can report the use of parts including disposable parts used, swap outs, loans installed, parts exchanged and parts required. Expense reporting includes charges for gas, hotels, meals, parts and services. In reporting an action as closed, the engineer can record details including faults, causes, remedies, free text notes, and date and time.

Simple User Interface

The new field-service systems provide this set of capabilities through standard Web browsers or through a simple wireless interface on a device such as a Palm or Windows CE PDA. To connect remotely to the central database, the system typically operates through an ASP, eliminating the need for the telco to build and maintain a private wireless infrastructure.

Equipping field engineers with wireless devices makes it easy to change direction in response to a call involving an SLA. The PDA used by the field engineer can provide an immediate notification through an alarm that the field engineer needs to interrupt the current job and move to a different one.

The system keeps track of the qualifications and parts stocked by each field engineer in order to ensure an appropriate response. When the service field engineer logs in, the system automatically will route him to a central screen displaying outstanding calls, selected using various criteria such as call type, call number and customer site.

The key advantage of the wireless systems is that they provide the ability for real-time bi-directional communications with service field engineers. Service field engineers enter each milestone into the system, such as arriving at a new job, completing the job, going to lunch and using a part. This means that at any point, the system can track the location of each field engineer, how long he has been working on a particular job, when he is expected to be done and what parts he has on his truck.

Field engineers also can instigate new calls from the field, and the system automatically will report entitlement details. Having this information available on a real-time basis at headquarters makes it possible to use business logic to propose strategies for addressing SLAs along with regular service calls.

The capability of the new wireless systems to incorporate bar-code scanners into the PDA devices and continuously track parts usage helps promote intelligent dispatching decisions. For example, truck 12 may have the closest qualified field engineer but not have the part needed to restore service. Truck 13, on the other hand, may have the right part but be 15 miles away. Under these circumstances, the dispatcher operating the system may decide to send both trucks to a customer with a gold SLA agreement — one to immediately start work on the assignment and the other to deliver the part. On the other hand, if many qualified field engineers with the right part are close to the job site, the system might check to see which one is working on the lowest priority job and has an open block of time.

Show Me the Money

Perhaps the most important advantage of the new generation of field-service-management systems is the management-reporting capabilities that they provide. Especially critical is the way that these systems correlate service activities with their financial impacts to the organizations.

All costs incurred in performing a task for a customer, whether internal or external, are captured. This will enable accurate monitoring of the financial implications of all actions, relationships and performance measures.

You can, for example, track the productivity of individual field engineers in performing specific types of assignments and more accurately determine the type and location of your inventory. The cost efficiency of all processes is monitored, and bills are generated or cross charges accumulated accurately.

The field engineer can generate a new assignment in response to a request by a customer while he is performing another job. The system will access the entitlements database to determine if the job is billable and, if so, include the new assignment on the customer’s bill. Cost, margin and other financial types of analysis can be applied directly to the service activity.

The types and amounts of data that can be captured, queried, massaged, and reported on is seemingly limited only by the imagination of the service managers or executives. The best of these systems represents a quantum leap in capability. All in all, the new generation of field-service-management systems delivers the ability to fulfill SLAs on a much more profitable basis than ever was possible in the past.

Lee is Viryanet (www.viryanet.com) vice president – telecommunications sector.