Dynamic Workforce Scheduling for British Telecommunications
The Problem
British Telecommunications (BT) is one of Europe's leading providers of telecommunications services. BT employs over 50,000 field engineers across the UK to maintain networks, repair faults, and provide service to customers. Workforce scheduling is critical, and BT's ability to provide high–quality service while achieving maximum productivity and low operational costs is vital to the company's success and competitiveness. Doing so would require analytical ability to handle multiple elements and constraints:
- Assigning staff required evaluating staffers with different skill sets.
- Geographically, the engineers were responsible for a large service area.
- Staff scheduling in general requires accommodating staffers' numerous constraints.
- Scheduling in general is subject to frequent changes and substitutions.
The Analytics Solution
The Operations Research department at BT developed “Work Manager,” an information system that automates work management and field communications. In 1996, the Intelligent Systems Research group of BT enhanced Work Manager with a dynamic scheduler (DS) based on a combination of heuristic search and constraint-based reasoning.
The Value
Rolled out in 1997 and reaching 20,000 engineers in 1998, DS with Work Manager was saving BT $150 million a year on operational costs by 2000. When deployed over the targeted workforce of 40,000 people, the system was projected to save an estimated $250 million a year.
Kevin Bradley, BT UK Operations Manager, said, "Dynamic Scheduling provides a much more stable work allocation mechanism. It has the ability to look several days into the future, which gives us much more benefit.... The ability of this system to allocate high priority work is frankly awesome."
