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We hope you’ve had a chance to take a look around here on our new website. If you haven’t, you really should! If you have, you will have noticed the phrase ‘Digital Workforce Management’ used throughout the site. Digital Workforce Management is our new way of describing and organising what we do and the value our solutions bring to our customers.

 

What is Digital Workforce Management?

Digital Workforce Management is an approach, underpinned by technology, that helps you build a better, more effective working day for your teams in the field. Spanning mobile working, schedule optimisation and intelligent analytics – Digital Workforce Management provides a great foundation for driving digital transformation and greater efficiency across your enterprise.

3 Core Principles of Digital Workforce Management

  1. Mobilise – mobilise your workforce (keyword here being ‘workforce’ and not ‘back office’). Give your workers everything they need to get the job done via an app. They get easy access to the schedule of work, job details and full supporting documentation – and can update their progress in real time. Because it’s an app, the experience is simple and familiar to users. It’s all about empowerment of the workers. A simple app, but with astounding results.
  1. Optimise – with adaptive workforce scheduling you’ll be ready for anything. You will be able to make sense of the chaos and build an effective schedule for the real world. So much quality time is wasted, by travel disruptions, wrong people being sent to the wrong jobs, the list goes on. Smarter scheduling means transforming service quality. Maximising the time your staff spend delivering services and reducing the amount of time traveling between jobs will generate a sizeable reduction in frontline cost.
  1. Analyse – The data your teams generate as they undertake their work in the field has real value. Every action they record, every task they complete, every journey between locations can be used to improve the service you deliver. Analytics will help you capture and make sense of this information – giving you everything you need to deliver operational excellence, now and in the future.

These 3 disciplines are at the heart of our Digital Workforce Management approach and our hope is that you will find them to be a useful way to structure your thinking as you approach the digital transformation of your field workforce.

Digital workforce management used by a field worker

 

So Why Digital Workforce Management and Why Now?

What are the forces shaping our new approach?

One is the ongoing consumerisation of IT: your staff are using mobile devices in every other aspect of their lives. As a result, this is having a major impact on what your staff expect from their business processes. On a related theme – user-centricity: as your staff become more mobile, they become increasingly frustrated with clunky, outdated IT.

Another driver is connectivity. Your staff need constant access to data if they are to work effectively and efficiently. They need access to information at anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

However the main driver is operational excellence – the benefits that Digital Workforce Management brings in this regard are massive: higher productivity, cost savings, greater customer satisfaction,  business growth. The list continues to grow as adoption among the workforce gathers pace.

 

Benefits of Digital Workforce Management

These benefits are continuous, AND they have the potential to further improve over time. The main factor for this; smart analytics. Computer Weekly predicted that analytics will be a major driver of software growth. Smart analytics allow your organisation to prepare for the future. It’s about 2 main things.

  1. Improving operations – manage resources, and identify and rectify inefficient processes. Having these insights into your organisation is invaluable. Your staff are generating useful information every minute of every day, and the honesty is, you’re sitting on a gold mine without even realising it. With smart analytics you can predict future trends to start saving money, and increase productivity.
  2. Reducing risk – you can foresee any issues before they happen. Looking back on past jobs, you can identify any safety or security issues that may have happened, and better prepare for them in the future. Smart analytics allow you to be reactive in the service you deliver.

 

Business analytics and mobile working

Why Analytics Should Be Focused On

  • Growing volumes and types of data, and more interest in using data to produce valuable insights (as we mentioned previously).
  • Cheaper hardware and the power and sophistication of underlying technology.
  • Easier-to-use software.
  • Tougher economic conditions and a need for competitive differentiation.

 

Graham Softley from Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust reinforces these reasons:

“Yes, in many ways now is the right time to look at mobility; costs have come right down, driven by the amazing take-up of tablets etc in the consumer space. From a purely technical perspective, they are also a lot less clunky than they used to be, much easier to encrypt (so important patient data is properly protected), the battery power has come on an amazingly long way, and they are much better now at doing useful things when offline –  which certainly wasn’t the case even just a couple of years ago. So, the usability factor is really high for mobile technology now, as is the size and lightness, there are many positive reasons to go this way for sure”.

 

Digital Workforce Management allows you to build a solid foundation for operational excellence and improvement. What are you waiting for? Get in touch at www.totalmobile.co.uk/contact

Totalmobile

Totalmobile is a Field Service Management (FSM) provider passionate about making work and the lives of mobile workers better. An established market leader with 375 staff across the UK and Ireland, Totalmobile supports over 1,000 organisations and 500,000 workers to transform the delivery of field services and experience an exceptional return on investment.