Direct Energy Essential Home Services provides repairs, maintenance and installation of HVAC systems, and energy-related home improvements to 1.3 million customers in Ontario, Canada. It also provides HVAC and plumbing protection plans to half a million clients.
Operating in an environment of deregulation and increased competition by smaller players, Direct Energy felt the need to boost its competitive advantage by upgrading its scheduling systems. They were already using ClickSchedule and decided to upgrade their existing system. Euclides was brought in to implement the upgrade of ClickSchedule and the new modules.
A team from Euclides began the implementation of ClickSchedule in November 2007, working with the Steering Committee, Information Systems and Business Operations at Direct Energy.
The main scheduling goals of this implementation were to:
- Improve routes – reduce travel time and minimize engineers idle time
- Improve service level by taking in consideration ‘same site tasks’. Different tasks within the same site should be combined and service should be provided by the same engineer.
- Prefer internal engineers over contractors in order to manage service cost more efficiently.
The above goals were achieved by using a specific ClickSchedule configuration, followed by an extensive scheduling tuning in our scheduling lab in Israel and on-site together with the customer.
In addition, Euclides’ implementation included customized modules in response to the following main challenges:
- Crew related customizations to encompass 3-tiered hierarchy: internal technicians, 3rd party contractors, and franchisee contractors.
- Prioritizing of service and non-service tasks
- Customization of system access according to three-tiered hierarchy.
- Enforcement of unique business rules related to labor regulations and service level.
- Management and maintenance of service capacity – to determine the number of available engineers / service hours per task type on a daily basis across the different areas.
The upgrade went very smoothly. The cooperation between Euclides and the client was excellent, and the implementation was completed on time and on budget at the beginning of June 2008. Due to the efficiency of the implementation, Direct Energy was easily able to deal with its specific scheduling challenges.