How Circet reduced their work order planning by 75%.

Could you tell us about Circet and its activities in a few words?

Circet is Europe’s leading provider of telecom infrastructure services. With a head office near Toulon, France, Circet has 105 branches across the country plus subsidiaries in Germany, Ireland, the UK, Spain and Morocco.
 
Our customers range from telecom and infrastructure operators and telecom equipment manufacturers, to key infrastructure owners and local authorities.

With the massive deployment of ultra-high-speed fixed and mobile broadband underway, both public and private, Circet provides its customers with turnkey services that cover all areas of engineering, construction, roll-out, operations and maintenance of networks, subscription sales and subscriber connections.
 
For one of our major operator clients, Orange, Circet carries out the production and maintenance of local copper and fiber work order requests in the following regions in Europe: Pays de Loire, Centre Val de Loire, Ile de France, PACA, Corsica, Alsace Lorraine, Bourgogne Franche Comté and Reunion/Mayotte.

Within this scope alone, 2,500 of our active technicians currently service clients lasting anywhere from 15 min onsite to several days. We’ve already completed:

• 86,000 FTTH assignments

• 144,000 garter cable requests

• 227,000 copper jobs

Nearly 460,000 work orders were completed during the first six months of 2019. We have a huge volume of service requests. To give you a better idea, in 2018 alone, our technicians carried out more than 900,000 jobs.

What was your initial pain point around Field Service Management (FSM)?

We needed a tool independent of our customers –

Firstly, due to confidentiality in regard to our field activities, we needed a tool independent of our client operators, particularly for data capture and technician job organization purposes.
 
We needed a solution capable of monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) –
 
Secondly, we were looking for a field service management software to integrate with our own internal tools, to make it easier to analyze the individual performance of each technician and monitor contractual KPIs. Our specifications featured other important criteria such as the supplier’s responsiveness in supporting and training our teams, and the quality of operational support over time.

We needed a robust interface in SaaS mode –

The solution we were looking for needed to be robust and capable of managing and planning a very large number of work orders for our technicians. Our goal was to acquire a SaaS (not “on-premises”) solution, to avoid having to undertake maintenance and upgrade operations ourselves. The advantage of the SaaS model was that everything lives in the Cloud, which eliminates the IT workload for us. Solution upgrades and maintenance operations are carried out directly by the supplier, which is much simpler to manage.

We needed an agile, permanent tool –

Lastly, in light of the high volumes of work orders mentioned above, it was necessary for us to have access to the solution from anywhere, instantly transfer work orders to our technicians, forward completed reports to our planners, and interface with our major account Orange, among other customers.

After doing extensive research on field service management solutions on the market, we chose Praxedo. The solution met most of our business needs and more importantly, we were enlightened by their enthusiasm around our project, willingness to work with us and the accessibility of executive management.

We should also mention that the players in this market are becoming rarer as our client Orange requires a specific interface which is continually evolving with new projects every quarter. This is extremely demanding for suppliers, and very few of them are capable of providing this kind of scalability. It is also this feature of Praxedo that prompted us to make a quick decision.

How does Circet use Praxedo and what key benefits does it provide?

We use Praxedo to manage activities for a variety of customers, with a strong focus on the Orange account.

Management of work orders from A to Z –
 
To date, Praxedo allows us to oversee an end-to-end implementation process including:

• Receipt of the work order from the customer;
• Planning as accurately as possible while taking into account certain time limits;
• Performance of the technician, with compulsory checkpoints;
• Detailed work order reports, including before/after photos that can be attached;
• The generation of an invoice for every work order;
• Monthly verification of invoices.

One could say that Praxedo has become our sub-ledger accounting system for invoicing justification as we have built a link with our accounting systems. It is a very practical tool for work order traceability.

Praxedo SmartScheduler for planning thousands of jobs a day –

As part of the planning process, we manage huge volumes of work orders each day. To do this, we use the route optimization module, aka Praxedo SmartScheduler (PSS) daily, which uses artificial intelligence to help us plan every job.

It has the ability to create accurate schedules for thousands of field technicians, by taking their skill sets and time constraints into account. The tool can be adapted to each local constraint. Say we need to filter with a specific skill set first, we can ask the PSS to match the number of work orders with the number of technicians identified with that skill set, all while strictly complying with the actual appointments. Next, schedules can be matched with jobs according to “umbrella-like” skills. And so on, until all work orders have been assigned.

Currently, 85 – 90% of our work orders are managed using PSS. The only prerequisites are the technicians’ skills and positioning on the map, along with their route’s starting point, which is not always from their home or the warehouse.

In fact, this is where the main challenge lied, as the location of our technicians’ starting points needed to be constantly refined and optimized by the PSS tool within their work orders’ radius’. Now, once the process has been optimized, scenarios can be created based on advanced search views, making it possible to implement sequenced operating procedures.

Since we initiated this process, we have reduced our daily planning time by 75%. We receive approximately 2,500 work orders per day and before Praxedo, it took us 4 hours to manage them. This time has been reduced to just 1 hour per day. 3 fewer hours a day allows activity managers to focus on more important tasks like improve customer relationships.

If you could summarize Praxedo in 2 words, what would they be?

Two words immediately come to mind: Responsiveness and Productivity.

1. “Responsiveness” as Praxedo has been attentive to our upgrade requests to meet Orange’s requirements, and from the support department that consistently provides solutions whenever we need them.
2. “Productivity” in terms of planning. Thanks to Praxedo SmartScheduler, we have gained so much more time.