By Partnering With OptimoRoute, Telgian Doubles in Volume While Reducing Planning Efforts by 82%
September 5, 2019 3 min read
INSPECTION SERVICES, NORTH AMERICA
Telgian has a unique business model of servicing a wide geographic area, with fire safety inspectors on the road for a full week at a time, traveling across multiple states. Planning routes and schedules for inspections, according to complex order constraints, used to be a manual process where it took 3 people 13 days to plan a month of inspections. Telgian needed to scale, and inefficient planning was the main blocker.
By implementing OptimoRoute, planning is now 82% more efficient, and it takes 1 person an average of 8 days, which translated into a 66% reduction in manpower.
With OptimoRoute handling more orders than what is possible for human planners, Telgian has been able to scale:
- YoY growth is 19% over the course of three years.
- Despite the almost 70% increase in orders, planning time and resources needed has not increased.
Achieved 19% YoY growth with OptimoRoute
Stable and predictable planning of overnight multi-day routes, accounting for all constraints
82% reduction in planning time: From 312 man-hours to 56 man-hours
66% reduction in planning manpower: From a team of 3 to a single person
Reduce your operational costs by 30%
Increase delivery capacity by 43%
Plan 7x faster
About Telgian
Telgian is a worldwide provider of fire, life safety and security services, and employs over 350 people. Its Testing and Inspections division performs inspections of fire pumps, fire sprinklers, and fire alarms for customers all over the USA. The company has a unique business model: its office is in Phoenix, Arizona, and all of its inspectors work remotely.
Jeff Schaid is the Support Services Manager for the Inspection division. It oversees the field inspectors and takes care of planning, logistics, and travel arrangements for seventy field inspectors: they’re based in thirty-five states and do inspections all over the country. The inspectors are on the road all week on one continuous route with an average of 15-20 inspections – usually starting at home on a Monday morning and then don’t return until Friday.
1985
Founded in
350
Number of employees
20%
Annual growth
Telgian Needed to Be Able to Scale – Inefficient Manual Planning Was the Main Blocker
When Schaid joined Telgian in 2016, the company was performing around 3000 inspections a month. He was surprised that planning was being done manually on a mapping program:
“It would take almost three weeks for a team of three to do routing for the whole country. The process was slow and inadequate: the system couldn’t create the multi-day overnight routes that our inspectors needed, and it didn’t recognize other essential operational constraints.”
Manual planning was incredibly inefficient and clearly wasn’t scalable. It wouldn’t be able to cope with an increasing order load – Telgian wanted to improve inspector productivity, but first the company needed to find a planning solution with the capacity to handle more orders.
Before implementing OptimoRoute, Schaid had looked into plenty of programs:
“A Microsoft product seemed to be the only option that was appropriate – even though it couldn’t accommodate all of our specific constraints and it cost 10x more than OptimoRoute.”
Growth Would Not Have Been Possible Without OptimoRoute
OptimoRoute is
“We’re light years ahead of where we were, and this growth has been enabled by OptimoRoute.”
Had Telgian kept planning manually, it would hardly be possible to even plan the 5000 inspections a month that it’s completing now. Regardless of how experienced the manual planners were, it would still take hundreds of man-hours. Planning complexity increases exponentially, so eventually Telgian would reach a point where humans could not build routes according to all of its constraints – and that would be the end of its potential for growth. With OptimoRoute, Telgian has a solution that will handle a workload which continues to increase in size and complexity.
The Math Is Simple: Three People Needed Almost Three Weeks to Plan, Now One Person Plans 70% More Orders – in Half the Time!
Since starting to use OptimoRoute, Schaid says that the reduction in the time and resources needed for planning a growing number of orders is incredible:
- 82% reduction in planning time
- 66% reduction in planning personnel
- 19% more orders being planned per year
“It used to take three people more than two weeks to plan routes for the whole country. Now, we have 70% more orders per month, and just one person does all of our planning in about one week. We’ve gone from 312 man-hours of planning to 56 man-hours. It’s translated to annual savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries.”
There Isn’t a Constraint Out There That Telgian Can’t Manage With OptimoRoute – the Only Provider of Overnight Multi-Day Routes
With OptimoRoute as its technical partner, Telgian has a solution to one of its major problems – not being able to efficiently plan overnight multi-day routes. The software looks at everything that needs to be done for the month, and then plans week by week routes for inspectors.
The feedback from inspectors is positive: they’ve seen a tremendous improvement in the way the routes are put together by OptimoRoute. Each inspection has state-specific licensing requirements and certain skills required – Schaid knows this will be taken care of when orders are assigned. Routes are optimized to also accommodate various job durations, long driving times, lunch breaks, as well as
“There are route optimization programs out there that manage certain constraints, but there isn’t a constraint out there that we can’t manage with OptimoRoute, and that made all the difference in the world.”
100% ROI Was a Matter of Days – Not Weeks or Months
When commenting on the overall value of OptimoRoute to Telgian, Schaid explains that in the last three years there was hardly any discussion about the investment paying off. In every way that Schaid looks at what OptimoRoute gives Telgian, the advantage is clear: in terms of scalability, in terms of the man-hours needed for planning, and in terms of salary savings:
“ROI was a matter of days – not weeks or months. To be honest, I always fear that it’s going to sound like I’m being paid by OptimoRoute but the fact of the matter is that’s the way we feel and that’s just the way it’s been.”
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