Today’s business professionals, with a mobile phone always in their hands, expect to make quick decisions, have access to the right information and change their minds to new or unforeseen circumstances. These prominent trends in the consumer world will soon transfer to the business world, too. Soon, planners will no longer spend hours looking at different options, manually scheduling deliveries, coordinating nurse visits, or managing technicians’ visits. Their job will evolve, and technology will play a significant part. Planners will oversee the planning process, both months and weeks before operations, to anticipate future needs as well as during operations to ensure that roadblocks are swiftly identified and resolved smoothly.

As providers of planning software, it is essential to understand the broader challenges our customers face, not only the ones purely related to planning – but also those involving people, corporate image, and social responsibility. We’re coming from a situation where the main users of our software are operational planners whose work is very intense, especially in the couple of days before operations, ensuring that all orders can be fulfilled. This often requires a lot of digging into the data, manual interventions, and numerous assumptions.

Moving forward, with more information available in the cloud and in our data and analytics system, the relationship between ORTEC’s software and its users will shift. The burden of raising potential issues and generating ideas on how to solve them will move from the users to the system. In the future, software users will therefore focus on intervening in urgent situations and overseeing a planning process that strikes the right balance between customer happiness, employee satisfaction, sustainability and cost-effectiveness. This balance can vary from company to company, depending on the overall company strategy.

Like any change, this transition will come with challenges and will not be frictionless. We are moving from a planner-centric model to a planning ecosystem that involves various stakeholders, including planners, dispatchers, drivers, nurses, and end customers. One major concern in this transition is capturing the vast knowledge and expertise stored in the employees’ minds, which is often difficult to quantify. This is a key point for the adoption of the next generation of solutions: employees and planners need to recognize and trust the information generated by the system, they need to be able to influence and overrule it when they feel the need for it, and they need to see it improve over time. A bigger impact we aim for with our solution will happen when two things happen at the same time: we offer smarter solutions, and our users use them to their full potential.