SAVELYS, leader of heating equipment maintenance in France, selected Opti-Time solution of the Group GEOCONCEPT to optimize the scheduling of its 3,500 technicians interventions.

The company

SAVELYS is a subsidiary of GDF-SUEZ and result of the merger of CGST-SAVE and DOMOSERVICES. SAVELYS is leader of heating equipment maintenance in France. SAVELYS is particularly focused on the proximity to its customers. With 250 agencies in France, they manage 1.5 million service contracts and perform 20,000 interventions a day. They have more than 3,500 technicians who frequently have training in partnership with major manufacturers.

The needs

The scheduling system had to integrate recurring maintenance visits and to take into account calls received by the agencies for repair jobs in real time. Appointments had to take into account the necessary skills, depending on the interventions, the possible time slots, the products brands, the geographical assignment of the technicians and their already scheduled activity. Furthermore, the implementation of the planning tool had to be done within the deployment of a new information system in SAVELYS.

The choice and the implementation

As Opti-Time previously satisfied the maintenance company Domoservices, SAVELYS has selected it all the same.

It had to be interfaced with the Oracle e-business Suite, the new information system SAVELYS had choosen.

The solution has been then completely set up to incorporate SAVELYS technical vocabulary, the characteristics of technicians and their professional practices.

Every night, the system loads in the planning maintenance visits batches for the next month, taking into account the fact that the technicians should not spend more than 50 % of their time for this kind of jobs. Visit notices are sent to the customers and, as soon as they send their agreement, it freezes the visits into the schedule.

On their part, the agency secretaries have an appointment screen that indicates the most relevant time slots. When a customer is calling, they can immediately find out the most economical slot.

The schedules take into account the types of interventions, the districts, the appointments which are already frozen, and the one that can be still putt off. It allows the agency managers to have a permanent overview on the work of their team. They also can “force” an intervention into the planning if it is necessary.

The benefits

«The vast majority of our agencies had no planning tools before. it was made manually, and based on the empirical knowledge of few people on each site. Therefore, the implementation of Opti-Time solution has brought a fundamental improvement: full automation of the planning, optimization based on objective criteria, shared planning» indicates Mr. De Keyser, who has led the project from end to end.

«The advantage for SAVELYS is the standardization of methods through the territory, as well as the productivity gain. The benefit for our own customers is our ability to respond in real time to their emergencies, taking into account their contractual specificities.»

«A standardized solution to schedule 20 000 interventions each day on the whole territory!»