Wheatley improves flexibility of GRASP’s mobile workforce ‘team jobs’ scheduling function for social housing repairs and maintenance operations with addition of new ‘assisted working’ capability

Published by humbugpr for Wheatley Associates in Housing and also in Central Government, Communities, Local Government

Bacton (Suffolk), UK – 31^st July 2012. Wheatley Associates, the leading provider of mobile workforce scheduling and efficiency software solutions, has significantly improved the ‘team jobs’ scheduling function in its market-leading GRASP mobile workforce scheduling and management system with the addition of a new ‘assisted working’ capability that delivers the flexibility needed to handle the complex variety of collaborative, team working scenarios encountered by social housing repairs and maintenance operations.

The new ‘assisted working’ functionality addresses the increasingly complex team-based scheduling requirements faced by social housing repairs and maintenance operations with skills-based mobile workforces by allowing jobs to be marked as potentially requiring assistance. Assistance may be required for a number of reasons such as working in a hazardous environment, working at height, working in a high risk location, work requiring heavy lifting, equipment holding or other multi-handed jobs.

GRASP is a browser-based appointment booking, work scheduling, tracking and mobile communications solution for managing any size field workforce. Once a job is booked, GRASP allocates work to maximise the efficiency and productivity of the workforce using its detailed knowledge of all the available operatives while also ensuring customer service commitments are met. With work schedules dispatched directly to and feedback on progress received from operatives’ PDAs/ smartphones, GRASP can dynamically re-schedule work and re-output jobs to an operative as the day progresses.

Assisted working extends the team jobs functionality in GRASP to give works planners the opportunity to modify (or not generate at all) the assisting operative’s job. This enables them to make use of their domain knowledge when planning assisted working. Typically a works planner could modify the skills required for the assistant, the length of time the assistant is required for, and whether the assistant is needed before, during, or after the main job. GRASP also now has the capability of splitting a single piece of work up over multiple operatives, enabling large jobs to be assigned to a team getting the work completed sooner. This additional flexibility enables the works planner a far greater degree of control over the work they are scheduling. Job metrics, start/ends times, time sheets and non-working time are captured separately for each operative in the team. Additionally, progress for all operatives in a team is fed back to the scheduling system in real time, allowing works planners to monitor progress and handle any potential conflicts.

“GRASP is already used by numerous housing associations and local authorities to schedule and manage their skills-based mobile workforces responsible for their social housing repairs and maintenance,” said Lisa Norris, Managing Director of Wheatley Associates. “The new assisted working capability for collaborative and team jobs we have added to GRASP is designed to meet the increased complexity they face and ensure they can continue to run their mobile workforces at maximum efficiency.”

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About Wheatley Associates

Wheatley Associates are experts in mobile workforce scheduling and efficiency. Drawing on its extensive software development heritage and its understanding of multi-dimensional scheduling requirements, the company provides a range of software solutions to manage complex, real-time mobile workforce scheduling demands. Applicable to a broad range of industries, markets and applications, the company’s mobile workforce scheduling solutions dynamically balance work allocations and take account of changing events to maximise productivity and ensure the optimal use of costly resources. The company’s scheduling solutions are backed by a comprehensive range of in-depth consultancy services designed to help clients understand and address the mobile workforce ‘Efficiency Bleed’. Additionally, with its leadership position in the provision of asset and data management solutions to the utilities industry, the company continues to be well-placed to take advantage of the emerging Smart Meter and Smart Grid initiatives. Wheatley Associates is a privately-held company based in Bacton, Suffolkin the United Kingdom. For further information, please visit: http://www.wheatley-associates.co.uk.