GCI automatically dispatches 95% of its work orders with Oracle Field Service
The telecommunications firm turns to Oracle Field Service to save its dispatch department 45 workdays per year for value-added tasks.
“It takes Oracle Field Service two minutes to do what previously was a two-hour manual job. About 95 percent of the dispatchers’ routing work is going to be automated. They are already taking on additional duties in anticipation of that workload cut.”
Business challenges
GCI Communication is the largest telecommunications provider in Alaska, delivering cable TV, high-speed broadband internet, and telephone services to business, public sector, and residential customers. The company provides service to 200 communities via fiber optic, satellite, and metropolitan area networks.
When analyzing how to improve business operations, GCI focused on its service technicians working at remote communications sites. Application engineers noticed that technicians had to spend hours at the end of the day manually recording and transferring information they had collected. Technicians had to record the network hardware information by filling out what they call “node fields” into a separate database for node addresses–a manual, time-consuming, and disconnected process. Technicians also spent a significant amount of time looking up node locations from another system and relaying that data back to the mobile device used in the field.
When completing work orders back in the service center, GCI’s dispatchers had to manually check and associate each node with the right ticket, which unnecessarily increased manual processes. It became clear that to streamline operations, GCI needed to fix node locations and unite siloed data.
With years of experience and in-depth knowledge working with Oracle Field Service, GCI has continued to extend and enhance its use of the solution–including making critical hardware information available and usable to dispatchers working in OFS.
Why GCI Communication chose Oracle
GCI originally chose Oracle Field Service more than 10 years ago. The company chose OFS for its integration flexibility because GCI was migrating its customer support and billing platforms at the time. Another deciding factor in selecting Oracle Field Service was its powerful automatic routing and scheduling capabilities to efficiently automate the dispatching of daily field service work.
Results
Part of the Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience suite of applications, Oracle Field Service allowed GCI to expose all relevant data fields, including node locations, to the assigned technician’s smart device. Using Oracle Field Service, the company automatically scheduled 95% of work orders, allowing dispatch teams to focus on high-value tasks like solving urgent or critical issues for customers.
Application engineers at GCI enter Oracle Field Service and turn on the necessary visibility, meaning that dispatchers no longer have to spend valuable time searching for information in a separate database. When technicians review their work after a day on site, node location and other important data is already imported. This enhancement saved the company’s dispatch department an average of 45 workdays per year, without making major alterations to the application, thanks to the system’s configurability.
GCI uses Oracle Field Service’s powerful scheduling automation to select the most suitable technician for each job based on unique work and performance profiles. Oracle Field Service also gives dispatchers real-time visibility into a technician’s time of arrival, enabling dispatchers to maximize routing efficiency and use of staff. This is a crucial advantage for dispatching field work, given the large distances between locations in Alaska.
About the customer
GCI delivers connectivity to rural and urban Alaska. It provides connected internet, phone, and cable while serving small, medium, and large business across industries. Most recently, GCI has focused on investing in strong infrastructure and new projects like fiber optic connectivity.