Mplsystems has just won its second funding award from the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK. The ‘Advanced Engineer Scheduling Optimisation & Prediction’ (AESOP) project will prototype a new application to enable real-time optimisation of field service technicians using the internet of things (IoT) and other external feeds.
The AESOP project will combine real-time data feeds about traffic flows, the weather and calendar events, with data from IoT devices. This will be correlated with customer preferences and information about engineers’ workloads, locations, parts and skills. The scheduling will include optimised sequencing of the various field-service activities and the best routes between them.
Paul White, CEO, Mplsystems, said, “Scheduling technicians and optimising routes in real-time is a challenge for any business which provides services in the field. Couple that with unforeseen events, such as traffic delays, over-runs and customer changes, and the result is that these companies are forced to trade off efficiency against customer service.
“Companies today rely on inefficient manual or partly-automated internal processes and are therefore unable to react quickly. Our latest algorithms are changing the dynamics, plus we are combining the latest IoT devices to predict and resolve break-downs before they happen.”
Mplsystems said that the anticipated benefits of the AESOP were dramatic, with organisations expected to be able to reduce their overall maintenance, planning and administrative costs by at least 50 per cent.
This latest funding follows Mplsystems’ first award from Innovate UK which focused on using text analytics to provide intelligent, automated responses in complex contact centre environments.
