George Anim-Ansah

On Optimising Resource Planning in BT plc with FOS

The need to move from reactive to proactive resource planning has been highlighted by industry analysts, academia and enterprises. Proactive resource planning provides business users with a view of future jobs, which in turn will help them to plan their workforce utilisation appropriately in order to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction. This paper presents the application of FOS, an integrated service management system, for managing the resources of BT. FOS incorporates applications for reliable workload forecasting, optimised workforce planning, as well as advance tools for visualising and communicating the outputs to end users

Strategic Resource Planning

One of the cornerstones of successful organisations has been the optimal use of their workforce. Two types of resources characterise service organisations: front and back office resources. These resources are defined by their capability (i. e., skills), location and availability. Front office resources handle incoming demand whilst the back office resources execute the services related to the demand. Planning of such resources can be carried out at one of three levels: strategic, tactical and operational; referring to long-, medium-, and short-, term planning respectively. The three levels for planning may overlap or may be distinct. Either way there is a flow of information from strategic to tactical and from tactical to operational. The loop is then closed by flow of information from operational back to strategic (see Fig. 3.1). In this context, strategic planning provides information on the overall balance of customer demand with available resource capacity. Tactical planning suggests a coarsegrain allocation of resources to tasks with no consideration given to when those tasks must be executed. And operational planning represents the allocation of specific resources to specific tasks; detailing the specific times of execution. The level of detail required for planning increases as one moves in time from strategic to operational. For strategic planning it is sufficient to analyse resource requirements based on the number of resources and their levels of productivity. On the other hand, for operational planning it is imperative that details such as starting location, preferred working location, scheduled hours, and availability for overtime are identified for accurate deployment to be realised.

FieldPlan: Tactical Field Force Planning in BT

In a highly competitive market, BT faces tough challenges as a service provider for telecommunication solutions. A proactive approach to the management of its resources is absolutely mandatory for its success. In this paper, an AI-based planning system for the management of parts of BT’s field force is presented. FieldPlan provides resource managers with full visibility of supply and demand, offers extensive what-if analysis capabilities and thus supports an effective decision making process.

A Two Stage Optimisation System for Resource Management in BT

Resource management is a three step process of job demand forecasting, resource planning and resource distribution. Job demand forecasting is data intensive and requires sophisticated algorithms. Resource planning and distribution are complex processes, usually involving the analyses of large amounts of information. The complexity increases when more than one objective is being evaluated and the number of variables to consider is huge. Clearly the amount of effort and time required for accurately managing resources warrant an automated approach, especially for large customer service organisations such as BT. This paper describes a two stage optimisation system which is part of the ARMS architecture for automating resource management in BT. The paper focuses on a hybrid resource planning and distribution system that is underpinned by constraint-based and multi-objective optimisation methods. We have developed Collaborator, a resource distribution system which sits on top of Dynamic Planner, a resource planning system. By using this novel integrated approach, BT aims to optimise resource deployment through increased workforce utilisation and mobility and ultimately to substantially reduce its operational costs.

Field Service Planning as an Enabler for Field Service Optimisation

In this paper, we present a solution developed at BTs Intelligent Systems Research Centre which addresses the issue of proactive service planning with the ultimate goal of aligning supply optimally to meet the anticipated demand. The planning process generates two plans; a capacity plan and a deployment plan. The capacity plan provides all relevant details in volume in terms of the anticipated demand and the available supply whereas the deployment plan is a finer-grained refinement of the capacity plan which specifies where resources should be deployed (geographical locations) and what resources should be used for (skill assignments). These plans are generated by efficiently matching a pool of available resources to a number of jobs that need to be done using an advanced search algorithm. Our optimisation approach incorporates a number of rules and parameters in order to satisfy variable sets of goals, for example to minimise cost, to maximise quality of service, or combinations of both