Utilities, rail operators, and miners maintain enormous amounts of equipment spread across vast geographic areas. Every piece of that equipment has different maintenance requirements. Every job requires different skills and different equipment. And every day, teams spend hours on the road getting from one job to the next.
The question is: does it have to be this way?
The Problem
Most organisations try to make the problem manageable by allocating teams to zones. It sounds sensible. A team covers a geographic area. They do the work that needs doing. Simple.
But it doesn’t work well in practice. Workloads vary. One team might be stretched and working overtime while another team in a neighbouring zone has capacity. A breakdown might happen just outside a team’s area, forcing another team to travel twice as far to get there. And when teams are left to schedule their own days, it’s almost impossible to measure or improve productivity.
The result is wasted time, wasted fuel, and a workforce that spends more time driving than fixing things.
The Approach
Opturion has spent the last five years working on this problem. Projects with SP-Ausnet, Origin Energy, City West Water, and Hitachi Rail have given us a deep understanding of how to optimise mobile workforces.
Our Mobile Workforce Optimisation (MWO) tool takes a different approach. Instead of fixed zones, it builds schedules dynamically based on:
- The location of each job
- The capabilities and efficiency of each team
- The current workload of each team
- The equipment required for each job
- The availability of teams and equipment
The optimiser runs at the beginning of each month to generate a preventative maintenance schedule. Then it re-runs nightly to reschedule jobs based on what’s actually happened during the day.
What It Handles
MWO handles two distinct types of work:
Preventative maintenance jobs. These are planned in advance. The optimiser assigns each job to a team, a date, and a time. It ensures that teams have the right skills and equipment. It balances workload across teams. It even ensures that teams finish their shifts close to home, which helps with fairness and morale.
Responsive jobs. These are breakdowns and fault reports that can’t be planned. The optimiser generates ranked recommendations for which team should respond. It considers arrival time, priority, location, team capability, equipment, cost, and whether the team is a subcontractor. The dispatch operator uses these recommendations to make an informed decision.
The Results
The benefits have been significant.
Productivity improvements of up to 20%. Teams spend less time driving and more time working.
Better response to breakdowns. The optimiser identifies the closest, most capable team for each job, reducing response times.
Improved effectiveness. More preventative maintenance jobs get completed within schedule.
Why It Matters
For asset-intensive industries, maintenance is a significant cost. But it’s also essential. You can’t skip it. You can’t cut corners. What you can do is make sure you’re doing the right work, in the right place, at the right time, with the right people.
MWO doesn’t reduce the amount of maintenance work. It reduces the amount of wasted effort.
