Decision Sciences Journal
Volume 30, Number 3
Summer 1999
Scheduling to Improve Field Service Quality
Dyan L. Haugen and Arthur V. Hill
Curtis L. Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota,
321 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455, email: ahill@csom.umn.edu
ABSTRACT. This research addresses the problem of scheduling
technicians to travel from customer site to customer site to
perform emergency maintenance on office machines, computers,
robots, telecommunications equipment, medical equipment, heating/cooling
equipment, household appliances, and other equipment. We call
this the Traveling Technician Problem (TTP). In its simplest
form, the TTP is a multiserver, sequence-dependent, tardiness
minimization problem. This research frames the TTP as a service
quality maximization problem in which service quality is defined
in terms of mean tardiness, mean technician phone response time,
mean promise time, and mean response time. Tardiness is defined
with respect to contractually guaranteed response times. Industry
practice is to use dispatching rules to assign service calls
to technicians. This research proposes scheduling procedures
to maximize field service quality in a dynamic environment. A
simulation experiment was used to compare three dispatching rules
and three scheduling procedures for the TTP. The scheduling procedures
dominated the dispatching rules on all four service quality measures.
The proposed scheduling procedures hold promise for improving
service quality in a wide variety of field service organizations
and in other scheduling environments as well.
Subject Areas: Quality, Service Operations, and Simulation. |