Eneco

The Challenge

Every year, 200 Eneco technicians visit more than 250,000 customers to service and install boilers, district heating, TOON and sustainable solutions, such as heat pumps, solar panels and home batteries. Eneco strives to play a leading role in the energy transition, which is why it is challenging itself to maximize customer satisfaction with smart capacity and route planning algorithms. Day in, day out!

How we create value

Capacity optimization; customers can always get a suitable appointment
Route optimization; giving engineers more tinker time and less travel time
Optimal matching between capacity and outstanding work

Benefits

Higher customer satisfaction and missed appointment rate down from 40% to 4%
Starting every day with a full schedule and optimized routes
Order manager, who is responsible for assigning duties, gets to focus mainly on incidents
Healthy workloads and minimum travel time for engineers
Optimal use of engineer capacity

Industries

Professional & Technical Services

Higher customer satisfaction and optimal workforce utilization

Not so long ago, Eneco still worked with appointment cards, which meant that engineers would often show up for a visit without anyone to open the door for them. In fact, this happened up to 40% of the time. Clevr, a Mendix partner, digitized this process and enriched it with ORTEC's optimized Field service scheduling. Customers can now schedule their own appointments, choosing from various options with various levels of sustainability. Because customers schedule their own appointments, they are more likely to be at home when the engineer arrives. As a result, Eneco can now make optimum use of its workforce, which is the biggest win: The reduced number of missed appointments and increased customer satisfaction. As Process & IT Expert Peter van Rhenen puts it: "ORTEC is an important and reliable link that helps us improve our Workforce utilization rate. Good engineers are scarce, so it’s essential that we make optimal use of our existing Workforce.”

Capacity first

On top of the order manager, who is responsible for approving the duties assigned to engineers, we have a capacity manager, who analyses where the calendar can still be filled up in the long term. The system then suggests where there is room to invite a certain number of customers for maintenance visits. On top of that, the system also carefully monitors annual maintenance contracts, allowing Eneco to meet its contractual obligations thanks to a proposed maintenance schedule that optimizes itself as time goes on. All in all, this means that more and more engineering activities are optimized in a single environment.

Change to Data-driven Field service

Scheduling, which is largely done using ORTEC's algorithms, prompted a major culture shift in the organization. And because the new routes didn't always seem logical, they met with some resistance at first. Van Rheenen explains how ORTEC used a game to launch the new data-driven routes. “We told them: you have to visit this number of addresses with this number of engineers, now go ahead and create us a schedule by hand. Next, the algorithm was put to work to show that there was a much better, much quicker way. The main learning is understanding which choices are made by the algorithm and why they benefit Eneco.” Jere Zandijk, team manager of the scheduling department and order managers, adds: “It helped us build trust in the early days, but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped challenging ourselves since. We now have a working group to explore possible areas for improvement once every two weeks, which has a twofold benefit: it makes us more efficient and allows us to help more customers. We are working on rolling out this method to more and more activities and processes, and the ultimate goal is to integrate everything into a single My Eneco environment, giving customers full transparency and control.”

“We believe we have a bright future ahead of us and that, together with ORTEC, Eneco has what it takes to play a leading role in the energy transition."

Eneco's partner to realize ambition for growth

Eneco is ambitious and looking to grow, and by constantly identifying and tackling areas for improvement, Eneco can realize that growth. “ORTEC can help Eneco make progress: It's all about conversion and using these algorithms, as well as other tools, to plan even further ahead. This is just one of the questions we want to answer with Data Analysis to help Eneco grow”, Van Rheenen explains. Zandijk adds: “We are entirely convinced that the optimal task allocation and capacity scheduling delivered by ORTEC has given us a future-proof solution that guarantees efficient use of resources." Van Rheenen concludes: “We believe we have a bright future ahead of us and that, together with ORTEC, Eneco has what it takes to play a leading role in the energy transition."