• E-mail this page
• |  Print this page
• | 
• | 
• | 

Managing A Telecom Workforce

During the Olympics, China Netcom (CNC) Beijing, the city's largest fixed-line voice and data communications provider, must ensure that some seven million Olympics customers -- athletes, coaches, officials, staff and spectators -- have reliable voice, broadband, video transmission, and Internet service.

To support telecom operations at the Games, CNC Beijing has deployed 1,600 field technicians with various installation, maintenance, and repair skills and special passes to get into each of nearly 60 Olympic venues. These technicians are responsible for addressing problems quickly and ensuring maximum uptime.

CNC Beijing is managing this army of technicians with the help of automated workforce management software from ClickSoftware Technologies in Burlington, Mass. The software helps managers ensure that the right technicians with the appropriate skills, parts, and venue passes get to the right job at the right time.

The telecom provider is using ClickSoftware's ClickSchedule and ClickAnalyze products to manage the scheduling operations of technicians responsible for repair, installation, and maintenance work throughout the two weeks of the Games. The technicians activities are being centrally managed from the Olympic telecomm control center in Beijing.

ClickSchedule is designed for the field service industry, enabling service managers to define how each of the key performance metrics in a service operation -- service level agreement (SLA)-compliance, overtime, travel time, etc. -- is considered in the scheduling process. The program automatically creates schedules in such a way as to optimize performance around the metrics.

The software automatically schedules the right technician at the right time, based on the person's skills and relative proficiency, location, availability. and other factors. It has the ability to schedule everything from simple, short-term tasks to multiday jobs requiring multiple technicians.

The software can be integrated with mobile devices for real-time monitoring of schedules, and provides automatic rescheduling in response to unexpected urgent calls, cancellations, or interruptions due to traffic delays or weather conditions.

ClickSchedule works with ClickSoftware's ClickAnalyze, an application that gives managers and dispatchers business activity monitoring through three separate modules: ClickAnalyze Reporting, a tool for creating reports that provide visibility of current and historical operational data; ClickAnalyze Insight, an analytics tool that provides monitoring of overall operational performance and trends; and ClickAnalyze Business Monitoring, which offers a way to quickly identify and monitor performance across the service operation with the ability to drill down to lower levels of detail.

ClickAnalyze is giving managers at CNC Beijing insight, via dashboards, into what's happening with the network during the Games.

« T-Mobile USA And HTC To Offer First Android Phone | Main | Commercial Apps For Consumer Linux: D.O.A.? »