Service planning: what is it and how can you improve your planning?

What is service planning?

Service planning is the process of planning and coordinating service activities by aligning employees, time, location, capacity and resources. The aim is to schedule the right service employee for the right job at the right time.

In short, service planning determines who carries out which service job, when and where. It takes into account availability, capacity, skills, priority and travel time. 

Service planning can be used for activities such as:

• maintenance
• breakdowns and repairs
• inspections and checks
• installations
• recurring service appointments

Service planning therefore goes beyond simply filling a diary. An employee may still have three hours available on a Tuesday afternoon, for example, but that does not automatically mean they are the best person for a new service job.

Effective service planning should therefore take at least five factors into account: availability, skills, location, priority and capacity. Depending on the organisation, materials, certifications, customer appointments and travel time may also play a role.

What is the difference between a service planner and service planning?

Service planning is the process of planning and coordinating service activities. A service planner is the person responsible for carrying out and managing that planning.

A service planner monitors which employees are available, schedules new service jobs and adjusts the schedule when work takes longer than expected or an urgent job comes in.

Why is good service planning important?

Good service planning helps you use available time and capacity as efficiently as possible. At the same time, your schedule directly affects the speed and quality of the service you provide to customers.

Reduce travel time and deploy employees more efficiently

If you only consider availability, you may schedule a service employee for a job that requires them to travel unnecessarily far.

By also taking location and travel time into account, you can group jobs more efficiently. This means less time spent travelling and more time available for service work.

Respond to breakdowns and urgent jobs more quickly

Service work cannot be predicted entirely. When an urgent breakdown is reported, you need to be able to see immediately which employee is available and where there is room in the schedule.

The better your visibility of the current schedule, the quicker a planner can determine which jobs can be moved and who can respond to the breakdown.

Improve customer satisfaction

A clear schedule makes it easier to keep appointments and tell customers when they can expect a service employee to arrive.

When the schedule changes, you can also communicate more quickly about a new arrival time or appointment.

Make better use of capacity

Service planning shows how much work needs to be completed compared with the capacity available. This allows you to identify where employees still have room in their schedules and where workloads are becoming too high.

This is useful not only for today's schedule, but also when making decisions about future capacity.

How does service planning work?

Service planning usually starts as soon as a new service request is received and continues until the work has been completed. A practical service planning process consists of seven steps.

1. Receive the service request

A customer may report a breakdown, request maintenance or have scheduled preventative maintenance coming up.

Record the most important information immediately, such as the location, preferred date, nature of the work and level of urgency.

2. Determine the priority and requirements

Not every service job is equally urgent. Determine the priority of the job, how much time it is likely to require and which skills, materials or certifications are needed.

A critical breakdown at a customer's site, for example, may take priority over preventative maintenance that can easily be moved to another day.

3. Check availability

Identify which service employees are available and who has the right skills.

Finding free hours in the planning is not enough. The employee also needs to be qualified and capable of carrying out the work.

4. Schedule the job

Schedule the job at a logical time, taking into account location, travel time, duration, capacity and other appointments.

Where possible, grouping jobs in the same area can help reduce unnecessary travel time.

5. Communicate the schedule

Make sure the service employee knows where and when the job will take place and has all the information need to carry it out.

The customer should also know when to expect the service employee.

6. Adjust the schedule

What happens if a job overruns, an employee calls in sick or an urgent request comes in? The schedule needs to be adjusted quickly without losing sight of the bigger picture.

That is why service planning is not a one-off puzzle, but a continuous process.

7. Complete and record the work

Afterwards, information such as worked hours, materials used and the status of the job can be recorded. If follow-up is required, this can then be scheduled.

An example of service planning in practice

Imagine that five service engineers need to complete twenty jobs in a single day. The planner cannot simply distribute these jobs across the available hours.

Engineer A, for example, is currently in one area and is certified to work on a particular type of installation. Engineer B has room in their schedule but is currently much further away. A routine maintenance appointment may also be less urgent than a breakdown that has brought a customer's operations to a complete standstill.

If an urgent breakdown is reported at 10:00 am, the planner needs to reassess:

• which engineer has the right skills
• who is available
• who is nearby
• which existing appointment can be moved
• how much capacity the breakdown is likely to require

That is the essence of effective service planning: not simply filling available hours, but continuously determining the allocation of work, people and capacity.

What is the difference between service planning, workforce planning and field service management?

Service planning, workforce planning and field service management are sometimes used in the same context, but they do not mean the same thing.

Serviceplanning therefore focuses specifically on efficiently allocating and scheduling service work. Workforce planning primarily looks at when employees work. Field service management is broader and, in addition to planning, often includes processes relating to customer information, work orders, materials and administration.

In practice, these systems can complement one another. An organisation may, for example, use an ERP or field service system for jobs and administration, alongside specialised planning software for scheduling capacity and work.

What are the biggest challenges in service planning?

Service planning is dynamic. Even a carefully planned working day can change within minutes.

Urgent jobs and unexpected changes

Breakdowns cannot be scheduled in advance. Jobs may also take longer than expected, customers may change appointments or employees may unexpectedly become unavailable.

An effective schedule therefore needs to be both efficient and flexible.

Travel time and different locations

An employee may technically be available but could be on the other side of the country. Looking at available hours alone is therefore not enough.

Including location in your planning allows you to group jobs more efficiently by area.

Matching the right skills to the right job

Not every service employee can carry out every job. Knowledge, experience and certifications may determine who is suitable for a particular service task.

If this information is not available within the schedule, planners have to spend more time finding the right person.

Limited capacity

During busy periods or when staffing is limited, choices need to be made. Without visibility of capacity, it is difficult to determine how much additional work can still be accepted and when workloads are becoming unsustainable.

Communication between the office and field teams

When changes are communicated through phone calls, emails and whatsapp messages, it can become unclear which version of the planning is current.

One central planning prevents planners and service employees from working from different versions.

Planning in Excel or across multiple systems

Excel can work perfectly well for a simple service schedule. However, as the number of employees, jobs, locations and changes increases, keeping the schedule up to date becomes increasingly difficult.

A large amount of manual planning also increases the risk of double bookings and mistakes.

How can you improve service planning?

Improving service planning does not necessarily start with buying new software. First, take a critical look at how work is currently planned and which information is available to planners.

1. Map the entire process

Look at what happens from the moment a request is received until the job is completed.

Where is information entered more than once? Where do delays occur? What information is the planner regularly missing?

Mapping the process makes it easier to identify where the biggest improvements can be made.

2. Plan based on availability and skills

Do not only look at who has time available. Also consider the knowledge, certifications and skills required for the job.

This reduces the risk of an employee arriving on site only to discover that they cannot carry out the work.

3. Take location and travel time into account

Where possible, combine jobs that are geographically close together. This allows you to spend less capacity on travelling and more on actual service work.

4. Keep capacity available for unexpected work

A planning that uses 100% of available capacity leaves virtually no room for breakdowns or overruns.

The amount of buffer capacity required differs between service organisations. Analyse how much unplanned work you typically receive and use historical data to determine a realistic buffer.

5. Work with clear priorities

Define in advance which jobs should take priority when the schedule needs to be changed.

A possible order could be:

1. critical breakdowns
2. work covered by an agreed SLA
3. appointments with a fixed customer date
4. planned maintenance
5. work that can easily be moved

The appropriate priorities will depend on your own services and customer agreements.

6. Work from one up-to-date planning

Make sure planners and service employees are looking at the same information. This prevents different versions of the planning circulating in Excel, diaries, email or other systems.

7. Make changes immediately visible

A change made in the office should become visible to the employee carrying out the work as quickly as possible.

This reduces unnecessary phone calls and misunderstandings and allows field teams to respond more quickly to changes.

8. Use data to improve your planning

Do not only look at today's schedule. Analyse historical data as well.

How long does a particular type of job usually take? Which areas generate the most travel time? On which days do you receive the most urgent jobs?

You can use this information to create more realistic future schedules.

Which KPIs should you use for service planning?

KPIs allow you to measure whether your service planning is actually becoming more efficient. The most relevant metrics depend on your organisation and the services you provide.

Common service planning KPIs include:

• Utilisation rate: what proportion of available capacity is being used?
• Planned versus actual hours: how much does the actual time spent differ from the planning?
• Average travel time: how much time do service employees spend travelling between jobs?
• Response time: how much time passes between a service request and the initial response or deployment?
• Lead time: how long does it take for a service job to be fully completed?
• First-time-fix-rate: what percentage of issues are resolved during the first visit?
• SLA compliance: what percentage of jobs are completed within the agreed service levels?
• Number of scheduling changes: how often does the schedule need to be adjusted during the day?

Where possible, avoid looking at a single KPI in isolation. A very high utilisation rate, for example, may appear positive but can become problematic if it leaves no capacity for urgent jobs.

What is service planning software?

Service planning software allows you to manage service jobs, employees and capacity from one central schedule.

Instead of manually tracking jobs in Excel, separate diaries or multiple systems, the planner can see from a single overview what has been scheduled, who is available and where there is still capacity.

Service planning software becomes particularly useful when the number of employees, jobs, locations and daily changes makes manual planning difficult to manage. 

Which features are important in service planning software?

The features you need depend on your service organisation. When comparing solutions, consider features such as:

• a visual planning board
• easy rescheduling of work
• visibility of availability
• visibility of capacity
• employee and team planning
• skills and competencies
• real-time changes
• mobile access to the schedule
• recurring work
• time registration
• statuses and progress
• reporting
• integrations with other business software.

For organisations with field teams, functionality relating to routes, work orders, materials, assets and customer information may also be important.

Not every service planning tool needs to manage all of these processes itself. Integrations with ERP, CRM or field service software can prevent the same information from having to be maintained in several systems.

When do you need service planning software?

For a small team with relatively few jobs, a spreadsheet may be sufficient. As you need to coordinate more service employees, customers and jobs, however, complexity increases quickly.

Service planning software becomes particularly useful when you:

• make frequent changes to the planning
• plan multiple service employees or teams
• regularly receive urgent jobs
• have insufficient visibility of available capacity
• spend a lot of time manually rearranging the planning
• work from different Excel files or diaries
• regularly experience double bookings or scheduling errors
• want employees to receive changes more quickly
• need to view planning and capacity over a longer period

When is Excel no longer enough for service planning?

Excel can be an effective starting point when your schedule is straightforward and changes infrequently. Its limitations become more apparent when several planners, service employees, locations and jobs need to be coordinated at the same time.

One important warning sign is when the planner spends more and more time maintaining the schedule rather than optimising it.

For example, employees may regularly call to ask what the latest schedule is, changes may need to be entered in several places or planners may have to manually work out who still has capacity available.

In these situations, specialised planning software can help provide greater visibility and flexibility.

Service planning with vPlan

With vPlan, you can bring work, employees and capacity together in one visual schedule. This allows planners to see which jobs have been scheduled, who is available and where space capacity or bottlenecks are emerging.

Work can be scheduled and moved easily. Changes to the schedule are immediately available to the team, ensuring that planners and employees work from the same up-to-date information.

You can also include capacity in your planning. This means you are not only looking at what has been scheduled, but also at the amount of work compared with the capacity available.

Do you use other business software as well? vPlan can form part of a broader process, with integrations allowing information to be exchanged between different systems.

This creates one central place for operational planning without necessarily having to move your entire business process to a new system.