GIS Strategic Service/Workforce Management (FFA)

Effective scheduling and dispatch of the network workforce

Utility and telecom companies are focused on operational efficiency and maximizing the effectiveness of its resources. GE has a track record of working with its customers to develop industry-leading products that solve real business challenges. GE can provide operational visibility of service-related business processes such as creating service requests, scheduling and dispatching field staff, tracking service level agreements (SLAs), managing spare parts inventory, providing advanced mobile capabilities for your enterprise, and forecasting how future workloads are likely to be distributed over time and over service area.

GE's Field Force Automation (FFA) solution supports all of these processes with an advanced optimization platform that enables field service operational excellence and provides our customers with best-in-class functionality, intuitive technology, and production-proven experience.

With Field Force Automation, all members of the service community have the ability to plan, execute and monitor long-term trends and short-term dynamic events to continuously achieve operational goals. Our holistic approach means that Field Force Automation allows the entire community to optimally perform their role throughout the service life cycle while creating a synergy between long-term and short-term plans.

GE's Field Force Automation solution:

  • intelligently automates processes associated with work and resource management life cycles from planning to execution. Maximum automation ensures best practice, making sure that the users focus on managing the exceptions while the system manages the routine.
  • provides agility to continuously respond to dynamic business conditions; ensuring adaptation to changing needs and constant improvement of existing processes.
  • offers powerful visibility by continuously monitoring the workings of operations, enabling your organization to make the right decisions in a timely manner.

Field Force Automation is an industry-open architecture platform designed for delivering distinct mobile workforce solutions that integrate with and leverage the best-of-breed CRM, ERP and application infrastructure software (e.g. BI, BPM, mobile middleware) utilized within the enterprise. An example of this is our certified integration with the SAP ERP solution.

Field Force Automation has the advantages of highly configurable behavior and ease of integration with other corporate systems using industry standard protocols.

The application consists of the following modules:

  • Scheduling
  • Dispatch
  • Routing
  • Mobile Gateway and Internet Portal
  • Mobile Data Terminals
  • Integration Server
  • Intelligence Data Mart
  • Workflow Engine

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    Field Force Automation provides comprehensive support for scheduling, assigning and tracking of Work Orders. The field teams are connected through mobile devices that are also used for feedback on order acceptance, current status and estimated time for completion, thus enabling a real time view of work in progress.

    Field Force Automation allows users to be highly productive by creating a holistic working environment for a specific use and/or a distinct role. For example, Field Force Automation contains dashboards tailored to management information, workload forecasting and resource planning, dispatching, administration, and executing the work in the field.

    Predictive analytics for Work Force Management
    GE’s latest offering in the area of Workforce Management is called Field Force Automation Forecasting & Planning and provides strategic forecasting of demand (work) and the planning of supply (resources) based on historical trends and projected future activities. Using Field Force Automation for daily dispatching and scheduling of work orders automatically generates historical data that is fed into an advanced statistical engine, which identifies seasonality, trends and outliers. This enables business managers to make better strategic decisions on the future long-term structure of their business, including capital investments, resource allocations and training programs to support an evolving business model.

    Field Force Automation Forecasting & Planning does not just “guesstimate” on historical business intelligence, but rather provides actionable foresight.