Schedules

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How times have changed in the world of scheduling diaries in Social Housing, for trade repairs and other resident visits.

There was a time when scheduling was the proverbial Marmite, with most housing professionals I worked with, either with the binary choice of ICT/application scheduling as ‘essential’ or ‘not essential as good staff are the key’. In the former case the options were pretty much ‘Optitime’ or nothing really, to automate and aid the efficient scheduling of work to be issued.

Funnily enough, I find you can pretty much ‘carbon date’ repairs people talking about scheduling in the Socialhousing sector, by if they call that product Xmbrace, Optitime, DRS (Dynamic Resource Scheduling), Kirona or OneAdvanced. Also, those guys memories, war stories and battle scars of a migration from version 4 to version 5 of that on-premise delivered product.

However, getting on to nearly two decades of diary scheduling in housing, we are in a very different landscape, one being more dominated by Cloud computing, higher expectations of APIs/integration and native browser delivered solutions as default.

We now have a wide variety and in some ways bewildering array of options open to us, particularly if we are interested in scheduling multiple teams, not just contractor repairs, maybe compliance, arrears and asset management & surveys.

If course a lot of software providers had a go at writing a scheduler (why how hard can it be?), crashing and burning or only having a single user etc. ProScheduler or was it PromasterScheduler is one that springs to mind, that I came across. I think I was always being told that someone new was always ready to sign up to it. Something that does not make sense in practice and clearly would have brought with it risks of little new investment or ideas going into it.

In the move (or rush for some software suppliers) to redevelop/modernise the integrated HMS for the Cloud, many are adding their own integral ‘scheduler’. These can have varying degrees of being ‘dynamic’, at times a difficult noun to define. At the bare minimum these can be ‘drag & drop’ diaries that feed mobile appointments, right up to some aspect of being able to reshuffle tasks (jobs, visits etc if you like). Many contractor solutions these days include their own scheduler option, sometimes after many years of integrating to the old DRS default. Examples include Totalmobile TM with their Optimise option. I think it would be prudent for suppliers to consider retaining the opportunity for clients, to go for the in-house as well as any preferred available external option.

In some recent procurements, I have worked with clients already with seats on schedulers, such as DRS and preferring to move to a new solution taking those forward. After all, they were currently just paying annual maintenance for those diary seats and this can be more economic/convenient than swapping out.

Contractor solutions used primarily outside housing, also often come with their own scheduling facilities. One example is BigChange, that provides bulk-scheduling options as well as the expected mobile integrations.

‘Plug-In’ scheduler options have been available for some time, such as Click (now part of Salesforce Field Service) and the new written for Cloud ‘More IQ’ solution. The latter is backed and designed by a number of original DRS development staff, including Gael Sianson a chap very recognisable from Optitime events. I remember an interesting evening exploring a hotel Calvados menu with him and his colleagues, many years back before the full move to Kirona.

I notice too that FLS (Fast Lean Smart) appears to be gaining some traction in Social Housing recently too. Good modern API’s are essential for these standalone options, particularly where an integration into Cloud/Browser applications or D365 (Microsoft Dynamics 365) are being considered.

The list above is not intended to be absolutely comprehensive, so apologies if I have inadvertently missed any products.

So, what should be considered when looking at the available options?

• Carefully consider (3 or 5 year) cost of ownership , including integrations, per seat and annual maintenance pricing. What are the costs of adding additional diary seats. Are these cheaper, the more you add?
• If an existing solution is already in use, is it economic to swap out? How well does that existing solution function, supporting the Customer Journey?
  
• Speed – For your mix of diaries (repairs, arrears, estate management etc), how fast can appointments be assigned? Will customer service agents have a resident on waiting for 3 seconds or 30? Is it this fast with ten diaries when demonstrated, or the 350 diaries in your actual real world staff team? 
• Will your scheduler work with self-service quickly and and any repairs diagnostic tool in place?
  
• How many matching metrics are needed? Areas, towns, locations, sub-locations, trade primary/secondary skills, ability/experience, multi-trade, paired visits etc?
  
• Are you looking for an on-premise or more future-proof native in the Cloud solution?
• Is there a preference to reduce software suppliers to a consolidated (trusted) solution or a mix of best of breed, with multiple suppliers and application sources/technologies?
• Is your scheduler choice already integrated (& proven) to your application software, or is a new interface needed? A rich set of available and well documented APIs can speed up the latter.
• Technology - If the scheduler is cloud based, can it support 1,000 diaries as easily as a 100 and scale up/down quickly if required?
• How much dynamic scheduling is really needed?
• How well would aspects such as road conditions and other minute by minute optimisations be taken into account?
• How easy should bulk automatic moving of diary appointments be possible. E.G. from three staff members that have just phoned in sick, having gone down with the Covid19 ?
  
• Also, will features such as 'doorstep' follow-on/up appointments be capable by trade operatives/other staff? IE staff on the scheme as well as office based agents can also flexibly re-appoint. Cloud based scheduling might be a certain advantage there.

At some point it would be interesting to put a blogpost together on some real-world scheduler experiences, or in fact examine one of the newer offerings in more detail if that were practical. Stay tuned if we can do that a bit later in the year.

If we can help your organisation with repair, DLO, contractor, scheduling, mobile or self-service application and transformation issues/procurement, please just get in touch, for a chat over a brew 😉

       Related Post:Why are Social Housing Repairs often these days so poor (or perceived as so)?

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David Cutter Music – Schedules.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


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