Alpha Tracker - Tips & Tricks - Webinar #16

Robin 

Welcome everybody to this Alpha Tracker tips and tricks webinar. It's a bit different this time because we're joined by a partner software company, Fast Lean Smart.

Simon and James have joined us. James isn't on camera, he's too shy. Simon, how are you? 

Simon 

I'm fine. Thank you, Robin. Thanks for the invite today. Great to be with you. 

Robin 

No problem at all. So I'm Robin. I'm a director here at Alpha Tracker.

We've also got Jack, who's the product manager for Alpha Tracker. Hi, Jack. 

Jack 

Hiya

Robin 

He's here to answer any difficult questions about Alpha Tracker. And James is here to answer any difficult questions about FLS.

And Simon, what's your job title? What's your role, by the way, at FLS? 

Simon 

I head up the partner side here at FLS so I speak to lots of obviously different software vendors, telematics companies, all sorts of things and obviously help drive the integration forward with many other software partners too. 

Robin 

Great, well you're very welcome, and thanks very much for joining us today, because I know that our Alpha Tracker consultancies are going to be really interested in what you've got to say. So a bit of housekeeping, it's 20 minutes or so, we'll do our best to keep to time. It's being recorded, so you'll be able to watch it afterwards to catch up with anything that you missed on our webinars page on the Alpha Tracker website.

Please do ask questions. So if you look in your Zoom toolbar that's come up on the screen, you 've got a Q&A window. That's where you ask your questions. Drop any question you like in there. If we don't get to the question in the webinar, Kim will respond afterwards to you with an answer after the webinar. So please do ask as many questions as you like. By the way, we can't see or hear you. That may be a good thing or a bad thing. So if you need to say something or want to say something, pop it in the Q&A window. Thanks very much. So quick introductions then about the products and our integration, because it's the integration that we're showing you today, the integration between Alpha Tracker and FLS Visitor. So Alpha Tracker is an end-to-end business management product for environmental consultancies. Specifically, our target markets are asbestos and water hygiene. End-to-end meaning from first contact with a prospective client through to booking a job in, scheduling the work, scheduling being important topic for today. That's what we're talking about, dynamic scheduling with FLS. Doing the work on site, automatic reports, invoicing, and then client portal at the end of it. So that's our end-to-end Alpha Tracker journey.

Alpha Tracker has been used now to survey more than 4 million buildings. So we've been around a little while and there's some of the team there on the photo, which is a screen grab from our website. Simon, over to you. What is FLS and what's this all about? 

Simon 

So thanks again, Robin, for the invite. Here at FLS, we provide scheduling.

So we provide the scheduling on steroids bit. So we're kind of like enhancing the Alpha Tracker scheduling experience and moving that on to the next level. Because a lot of our customers want that next level, especially as they grow and expand because scheduling gets harder bluntly. The bigger you are, the harder it is to do kind of like manually or with some of the great tools that are already there in existence, obviously within Alpha Tracker. 

Robin 

Okay, so dynamic optimised scheduling, would that be a good summary, a decent summary? 

Simon 

Absolutely. And I think that the next slide really explains to the users what the hell dynamic scheduling is. So I think I think this one screen explains it brilliantly left hand side is one of our prospective was one of our prospective clients and this is what they were doing in a day and you can see there that the scheduling was not great. It was all being done manually.

The right hand side the screen was exactly the same day, but playback using the FLS Shedding tool. So this is where it's shedding is one of those things that is a real cost to some users, not just for the back office element, but actually, you know, time in the field. And if you can begin to think about your scheduling better, and you can actually do it better, the costs you save are enormous. 

Robin 

And this is real data. This isn't made up.

Simon 

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Robin 

Wow. They saved half their money. And also just given everybody a simpler day by the look of it, because that diagram on the right is far simpler than the one on the left. 

Simon 

Yeah, it's all about sustainability, hitting those CO2 targets, plus also getting far more out of your workforce, and more importantly, you know, just making sure that you can hit your customers' SLAs on time, you know, that's what it's all about. 

Robin 

Okay. So why would, yeah, what's the, what would an alpha tracker customer be? Why would they be thinking about dynamic or optimized scheduling then do you think? 

Simon 

So typically, a lot of our prospective clients, they get to a certain size, normally when they've got about 40 or 50 surveyors out in the field and suddenly the manual scheduling becomes quite hard and there's sometimes some little subtle signals that certainly we see out there when we're talking to prospective clients and I won't go through all these so don't worry the audience on the thing, I'm just going to pull out a couple of them or a few of them. I think a real good early warning signal, be it are your engineers spending more time traveling or are you surveyors spending more time traveling than actually on site?

That's a really good early warning symptom. Are your actually SLAs not being hit properly? That's a really good early warning signal that you might have problems with your scheduling and then I think also the keeping hold of decent surveyors, bizarrely that's a real soft thing that's become so much more important over the last two or three years because actually getting those good surveyors is much much harder now and if you can make sure they leave home in a decent time and get home in a decent time, you've won half the battle of keeping them happy. 

Robin 

Well Jack, that's an interesting point, isn't it? Because our customers, especially in asbestos, are always telling us they struggle to keep good quality surveying staff.

So what you're saying there is, as well as the hard benefits, the cash benefits, the fewer miles benefits, you've got a soft benefit in that your surveying staff might be happier in their job because they're driving they're probably getting home a bit earlier. Okay. 

Simon 

Absolutely. There's all there's all these other benefits that come out of it, you know, but the obvious ones are obviously things like productivity and hitting your SLAs and all those kind of costs of fuel. But again, there's a lot of subtle benefits that come out of this as well. So absolutely.

Robin 

Okay, interesting. So yeah, so what's what's why why do you need a product like FLS that isn't this isn't I mean, we do a certain amount of optimizing in Alpha Tracker already, but I'm guessing nothing like what you do in FLS. 

Simon 

No, again, it's all about taking your clients to that next level, because typically when you get out of size, that's what they need. And, you know, we find that certainly that there's lots of scheduling tools out there on the marketplace. And quite often, you know, the manual arrangement, you know, there's only so much a human brain can do once you get to a certain size of organization.

And where we sit in the process is that we try to sit as close as we can to theoretical optimums, because it's about making sure we're getting the most out of those surveyors days, because it's not just about optimizing into the future. It's also about optimizing in the in day piece as well. And this one example here is a really good example of that. Just one guy, 10 visits to do in a day. Again, there's 3.6 million possibilities out there do ramp it up to 50, 100, 200 surveyors out in the field, it gets really hard to do manually. 

Robin 

So are you saying that if the water hygiene technician has got 10 water monitoring jobs, which could easily have. There are three and a half million different routes that they could go between the 10. 

Simon 

3.6. No, no, absolutely. What's point one between friends

Robin 

I think some of the technicians out there probably do most of those routes. Okay, so what you're saying is your algorithm enables you to optimize even the complex. 

Simon 

Absolutely. And it's all about, it's all about sub second, not batch. And that's the real key thing.

It's about real time and doing it in real time. Absolutely. How FLS works just very simply is it, it's a completely transparent solution. I think a lot of dynamic scheduling tools out there, some people are put off by them because the planners don't necessarily understand how it works. We're complete transparent because it's a cost-based algorithm because every job that gets scheduled in FLS has a value or a target value associated with it. So translated, what does that mean? Bluntly, if a planner needs to understand, well, why has that job been given to that surveyor over that particular surveyor? They can see that really quickly and easily. And likewise, the reverse is true. When the days are absolutely chock-a-block and someone goes off sick, if you've got to force something in to put someone into overtime, it shows you the least cost option to do it in. And it's all about taking into account all these different constraints that are on the left there. You've got to think about it. Yeah. 

Robin 

Alpha Tracker out of the box knows about some of those things so it knows about skills it knows about location but it certainly doesn't know about whether it certainly doesn't know about driving times and busy roads at busy times and I think FLS does doesn't it is that right

Simon 

So that's a really nice segue, we'll come on to that in one second on the next side. 

Robin 

I've got a little animated version of this.

Simon 

Oh, brilliant. Thank you.

Robin 

Bring that up. 

Simon 

Again, just just for the audience, again, how does FLS work? We just want to show you some of the things that FLS goes beyond most other scheduling tools.

So let's take this example here where you've got three engineers. Each of the engineers can do three jobs and a brand new appointment comes in down the bottom there. Now, in most scheduling tools, what we call white space tool is not how FLS works. That particular appointment there will go, oh, hang on a minute. We can't fit that job in because the pink guy's full, the blue guy's full, and the yellow guy is too far away. How FLS does it, again, if you just click on one more click there, it's very simple. We literally at the point that job is offered up, so you ask for an appointment. We're throwing every single job up in the air in the system and going, where can we squeeze it in? And we would know, actually, we could squeeze it in with the pink guy because we could move one of the pink guy's jobs to the blue guy and one of the blue guy's jobs over the yellow guy, thus fitting in. And then going on to that next scenario that you said about taking into account speed profiling, this is a really important example, even when you're booking jobs into the future, because you've got a scenario here, engineer lives there at the bottom, little person symbol, and you've got three jobs, and that looks like a sensible route, a nice round route. However, what it doesn't do at the minute is most scheduling tools don't take into account that rush hour traffic. So actually, how FLS works is we would route it slightly differently to avoid that rush hour traffic, because we may have cost the engineer maybe another half mile, but we've saved him 30 minutes in time, and that may be enough time to squeeze out one extra job in for that surveyor in the day. So again, that's a really good example of how FLS works. 

Robin 

Okay, so that is the sort of thing that if the surveyor or the water technician happened to know that patch, they might suggest that route anyway, but this is doing it automatically for everybody, regardless of the human sort of element. 

Simon 

Because embedded in FLS is what we call the Tom Tom IQ data is down to time of day traveling. I won't get too geeky. But again, we just know all that. So there's real time traffic as well.

That's another subject. But when you're booking in advance, you've got to take into account the time of day travel. Because if you if you'll say you're doing seven, eight jobs a day, even if you get that traveling calculation wrong by maybe five percent, you've maybe screwed up their day a little bit later down the line. So really important you take that into account upfront in the booking. And that's what FLS does. 

Robin 

Thanks, Simon. I thought that was a really good explanation. So this is where I'm going to show a few screens and this is where Jack gets nervous. So because Jack and his team have been integrating Alpha Tracker with FLS. That's what this webinar is all about.

It's that integration. So this is Alpha Tracker. This is FLS Visitor. So what I'm going to show is how we've linked the two things together. And I'm going to start out by showing a typical diary in Alpha Tracker where somebody's filled the diary for three people and it looks perfectly sensible. But in fact, by sending the data to FLS and bringing it back again, which is just a couple of clicks literally, we can optimize the schedule and reduce their driving time hugely, increase the amount of available time for them to do their work hugely and give them, frankly, three better days. So that's what I'll show you now. This screen here is a typical Alpha Tracker diary screen. I've got three people. I've got Dan, Jack and Tom. And for the purposes of this, we put in a lot of appointments in towns in Shropshire and they're real places and they could be real appointments. So I think we put them in Telford and Wolverhampton, Bridge North, towns around Shropshire about 30, 40 miles away. And we've also told the system where Dan, Jack and Tom live. And this looks like a normal appointment screen in Alpha Tracker and somebody's done their best to optimize. But here, this is where the connection comes across. So we've now got an option to send this data to FLS and you can pick a date range. This is FLS visitor. So at the moment there's nothing to optimize, but if I click the refresh button here, all of these appointments have now come across from Alpha Tracker and visitor then, FLS can optimize and fill the days for Dan, Jack and Tom. Now the interesting thing is if we look at the the map, we can start to see it's started to bunched them together, it's grouping them. So what it's actually done, it's taken that jumble of Shropshire based jobs and by looking at the proximity of the home addresses for those individuals and where those jobs are, it's now grouped them and optimized them and saved us quite a bit of time and money. 

Simon 

It's about skills, opening hours, all sorts of things as well. Absolutely. 

Robin 

So here's the original diary in Alpha Tracker. Click the refresh button and it's automatically come back.

And this is the new picture. And if I look just down in particular, what it's actually done, and it's quite interesting what it's done, it's picked out two here in three in Telford, a couple just outside Telford. These are all Bridgnorth and Wolverhampton again, nice and easy to get between them. And these again are geographically grouped around Bridgnorth by the look of it. So I can see the, it's interesting. When you look at real data, Simon, and this is real data that means something to these three guys and myself, because this is where we live, you can see the logic of what it's doing.

But obviously if this was 50 guys out on site or 70 guys or a hundred guys or 200, like some of our clients have, you'd need an army of schedulers, I guess, to optimize. Whereas FLS is just doing it with a click of the button. 

Simon 

Absolutely. Typically our customer ratio planners to actually surveyors out in the field somewhere between 1 to 30, 1 to 60, depending on what those surveyors are doing. 

Robin 

So those numbers will mean something to our clients watching the webinar today because I know that even with a team of, say, 100 staff out on the road, I think our customers would typically have four to six planners. So that's your ratio is significantly better.

Just one other quick one I'll just show you, which is a make a suggestion feature that we've put in. By the way, Jack, any questions at this point or should we just carry on anything that we've covered a lot of ground already? 

Jack 

One quick question was that can Alpha Tracker automatically send the appointments to FLS rather than just manually? So you show the manual export, can we send them automatically?

Robin 

Yeah, that's the next thing you're doing isn't it? We've just we've left it manual at the moment to be honest just to make to give the schedulers that element of control.

I think Simon that and I guess you must find this with the new customers that people want to keep a certain element of control until they're confident in the process. 

Simon 

Yeah, some of our prospective clients kind of like do it in stages so that they do just as you demonstrated there where they're just sending a whole day's worth of jobs over and it being optimized and then actually more importantly as you're about to show in a second getting cost optimized appointments going through. Other of our customers tend to ramp it up from the very beginning where it's just doing it real time all the time.

It's just really down to you. Some of customers want to lock their days in advance, some want to make it dynamic during the day because it's the in-day optimization that also adds a real amount of extra value into this. So it's just down to the client and again this is where the flexibility to the integration that you design really comes into play to help your clients turn up that accelerator as they want to on the system. 

Robin 

So this one is a make a suggestion feature. Now we do have a make suggestion feature built into Alpha Tracker, but it's only looking, what it's actually doing is looking for gaps in the diary that fit the length of appointment that you need. That's all it does at the moment.

The FLS version of this is quite different. So what I'm saying is I want an appointment in this date range. I want, in this case, I've clicked the AM button. So morning appointment and it's two hours long. This is using skills-based notions. So it's got the skills in there. It's got the person's home address in there. It's got the job, it's got everything in, and it's now made two concrete suggestions. So this particular job, this T-58048, it's suggesting that Tom would be the best person and it's given two appointments there.

And I can just click choose one of those. It puts it straight into Alpha Tracker. So we've hooked, so if you go with FLS, and obviously you'll need to talk to FLS about setting yourself up with them, but if you do, then we can make that connection and increase the effectiveness of our maker suggestion buttons. So yeah, these concrete numbers then, this is why people would do this. These are the sorts of improvements that they'd see, Simon, I guess. 

Simon 

Absolutely. So these are just like some real kind of like lowest level kind of like it benefits you'll get. But typically, as you'll see in a second, one of the things that we can do is almost like a scheduling test. But these are the kind of savings that you expect to get as a bare minimum.

And that's not even including some of the in day dynamic optimization that we can do, because, you know, what happens when an engineer goes off sick? You know, how do you replan that we just do that sub second at the click of the button, you know, you put the engineer off sick, you read, the survey off sick sorry, and you just read through all those jobs around the different surveyors really quickly and easily. So it's also about increasing your capacity. But the scheduling test is something that please speak to the team at Alpha Tracker about this. You saw this one slide at the top of the presentation, you know, that the next slide really is just about showing you some - here's a real life example, again, of a scheduling test that we did for another client, you know, this particular client had about 130 surveyors or resources out in the field. And we just did the test on 30 ReZero guys over a period of about four weeks. So once you ramp the savings up, not just over four weeks, but over 12 months, and not just over 30 people, but over 130 people, again, the savings get pretty eye watering. And this is what we can do for any of you guys that are listening to this today. Just speak to the Alpha Tracker team, and they can organize one of the the scheduling tests to take place. 

Robin 

So let me just say that again then. So what you're saying is for, especially the larger consultancies that use Alpha Tracker, if they talk to us, talk to their account manager here at Alpha Tracker, so Kim, Catherine, Zac, Jamie, we can then organize this and you can run a test through of some real data from their system to a month's worth or whatever, you can actually demonstrate what saving you could have made them.

Absolutely. And that's not to underplay the soft benefit of the actual site staff having a better day and actually having a more satisfactory experience.

Simon 

Absolutely. Some really interesting tasks to do. So feel free just to speak to the Alpha Tracker team about that. 

Robin 

Brilliant. Thanks, Simon. So we've got a QR code there, which will give you more information. We've got our integration page off the Alpha Tracker website, which has got all the details of all the integrations that we offer. As you know, if you're an Alpha Tracker consultancy already, that's one of the big features of working and benefits of working with Alpha Tracker is that we're very open to integrations and the FLS team have been fantastic to work with.

And finally, just a next step slide, I guess, in case there's any more questions, Jack and James, we'll just keep an eye on that. So, yes, we can offer the scheduling test. So just get in touch with Catherine, Kim, Jamie, Zac, ask for that and we can organize that for you with FLS. If you need more information about Alpha Tracker, there's our website. More information about FLS. It's the fastleansmart.com/en for the English version. And yeah, there's also the final thing is a little freebie. FLS have got an e-book which tells you all about dynamic and optimized scheduling. If you contact your Alpha Tracker account manager here, then we can organize you to have a copy of that for free. So there's a little freebie for getting to the end of the webinar.

Jack, what questions should we get? Oh, another question. 

Simon 

Okay, there's one question that's coming I can see from from Marvin. Thank you Marvin for that.

He said there are a few appointments on the optimized version that overlap, presumably this can be overridden or stopped. Absolutely. It's just down to certain rules, you know, some of those things may have been combined things on site at the same time that there's so many different things. We can do obviously two men appointment, so you've got two surveyors on site at the same time. You can do what we call relation type appointments where one surveyor has got to go in first and only when they finish can the next surveyor go in. All that is all standard functionality within the FLS scheduling site. So there's loads more that we can do there. 

Robin 

Fantastic. 

James 

There's a question that I've typed an answer to, but I think it would be very interesting for the rest of the room and viewers. Simon, does FLS work outside of Europe?

Simon 

Absolutely, so FLS was originally conceived over in Germany, so now absolutely we've got a big presence in mainland Europe as well. 

Robin 

What about outside Europe? So we've got a big presence in Australia, in New Zealand, is that somewhere you cover? 

Simon 

Yeah, no, we basically cover all the big markets. So basically, all the kind of Australasia, EMEA, Americas, rest of the Americas.

So no, absolutely, we cover all those areas as long as we got the TomTom data for it, which is typically most developed countries around the world, we're absolutely fine with it. And that's as long as we've got the row data, that's where we can really, really get very precise with things. 

Robin 

Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for joining the webinar today. Thanks, Simon. Thanks, James. Thanks, Jack, for keeping us honest. Thanks for your time. We're only two minutes over, which isn't bad for us.

Thank you very much and see you next time.