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Doing Things the 'Route' Way Lynne Brakeman, Pest Control Magazine Investing in network-based routing and scheduling technology has made Viking Termite and Pest Control, Inc.'s employees at least 10% more efficient, according to Jeff Graisser, the company's operations manager for the last five years. That kind of uptick in productivity represents an increase directly to the bottom line. When it comes to the no-nonsense benefits of a well-installed computer system, Graisser knows what he's talking about. He has plenty of experience doing it the low-tech way. "We managed commercial routes with colored index cards in racks at a former company where I worked," Graisser recalls. "Each route had a rack. One person was assigned just to manage routing for commercial techs. You would write on the card the number of minutes each job would take, and taking into consideration that a workday was 480 minutes, the cards had to add up. If a service was once a month, the card was one color. If it was more than once a month, it was another color." Viking, based in Bridgewater, NJ, has more than 80 technicians and nine offices covering the tri-state region. Graisser knows that a manual routing and scheduling system like that would just not cut it for Viking's far-flung operations. Besides residential and commercial pest control services, Viking offers lawn care, gutter maintenance, duct cleaning, chimney cap installation, insect light traps and moisture control systems. At Viking, color-coded index cards are a distant memory. "The manual system is still used by some companies," Graisser observes. "But, besides the time it takes to manually write information on the cards, all the information about the routes is hard-coded on the cards. There's no way to report it out so you can look at it and optimize the system." Graisser says Viking left manual routing systems behind for a UNIX-based system in the 1980s. UNIX and DOS operating systems predate the Windows operating system and have a text-only user interface. In 2001, Viking upgraded to Marathon Data Systems' Web-based RoutePoint. Employees access the system using the Internet Explorer browser over a private network that connects Viking's nine offices. A money saver According to Graisser, centralizing the heavy lifting of the data processing on two Web servers allows the company to save money on desktop computers in its offices. "Because it's a Web-based program, all the processing and data are done on the central servers. Our office staff doesn't need top-of-the-line PCs because they access the servers using Internet Explorer. All you need is a decent screen and some memory on the desktop," he says. Being Web-based allows Viking to take advantage of the Internet for some critical marketing functions. All its forms and letters can now be e-mailed to clients, and clients can use the company's integrated Web site to request and schedule services any time of day or night. "When you come in the morning and turn on your system, the online customer has already entered all the information for you," Graisser says. "After September 11, for some reason, it seemed like we saw a huge jump in the number of people requesting that we e-mail them invoices and statements instead of sending them in the mail." Graphic scheduling Graisser says graphic scheduling has increased his staff's productivity at least 10% since they switched to the system in 2001. Customer service reps can customize the graphic scheduler in RoutePoint so they only see schedule information for the techs they manage. Different colored bars that block out the amount of time a specific service takes represent different kinds of services. "The neat thing about this graphic scheduler is when Mrs. Jones calls me up and says 'I need to change when you've got me scheduled,' the rep just has to click on Mrs. Jones' bar to move her to a different time or tech," Graisser explains. "In the background, RoutePoint automatically changes the work tickets. Not only is this a tremendous time saver, it prevents you from double-booking a tech. Customer service like this means no mad customers." Besides colored bars that represent the type of service and how long it will take, the distance between jobs is also represented by colors. The RoutePoint system is integrated with Microsoft's MapPoint software: Click on one job to define it as the base, and when you click on another job, the color immediately tells the rep whether the new job is kind of close or really far away. Hold the mouse over a job (also called "hovering"), and there's a box with information such as client phone number, street, zip code, type of route, map code, technician, duration and customer notes. Every morning, the RoutePoint system prints out detailed route schedules, complete with color maps for the Viking techs. If it wanted to, Viking could give technicians home access to the RoutePoint system over the Internet and allow them to print out their schedules at home. Going GPS Graisser says that when Viking made the major switch to RoutePoint, it decided to add global positioning system (GPS) devices to its entire fleet of 90 service trucks and other vehicles. The hardware was about $700 a vehicle, and the GPS service is about $25 a month per vehicle. The GPS information serves two purposes: The customer service reps can go back and review exactly how a route they scheduled worked out for the tech. This allows them to identify ways to optimize the technician's time in the field. When customers call up with an emergency, one click tells the service rep which technicians are closest to the job and how long it would take them to get there. "It's the customer service reps who really appreciate the GPS," Graisser says. "They don't have to look through a list of 23 different techs to see who is available for a last-minute appointment. And, after a little grumbling at first, once our techs realized we weren't using it to be 'Big Brother,' they came around, too." Labor is No. 1 cost "In a service industry, the biggest cost is labor," says Graisser. "You have to optimize the routing associated with that labor cost. Anything you can do to eliminate human scheduling errors and use your people on the road and in the office more effectively - you're adding directly to the bottom line. "There are really only 480 minutes available in a work day," he adds. "Routing errors might be such that you might only get 180 minutes of actual work out of that 480. This software helps you optimize that individual's time. With proper routing, you could go from 180 minutes to 420 minutes of work done with only 60 minutes of travel." |
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