Sylvania Sees The Light In LogisticsSylvania Sees The Light In Logistics

Making sure service technicians get to customer sites at the right time and with the right parts can tax even the largest field-services provider.

Sylvania Lighting Services, a division of lighting product manufacturer Osram Sylvania, knows that as well as any company. Its 300-plus technicians, who manage indoor and outdoor commercial lighting and energy usage for retailers, supermarket chains, office buildings, warehouses, and government buildings, make more than 15,000 customer stops nationwide each month.

Sylvania this summer will begin deploying Descartes Systems Group Inc.'s RiMMS field-service logistics software to help the company build optimized service routes and schedules for technicians who perform inspections, repair and replace lighting systems, and replace burned-out bulbs. The software should boost productivity, says David Fine, controller for the Danvers, Mass., company, as well as enable Sylvania to better schedule technicians to respond to emergency calls.

Sylvania currently uses a manual routing and scheduling system for its technicians, who work out of 32 field locations. "There's too much subjectivity concerning where each technician is going and when; the software will let us build much more efficient routes," Fine says.

Each field location will continue to build its own routes and schedules but will be able to create routes that decrease the miles logged on each truck, better balance technician schedules to minimize overtime, and cut fuel costs. "We pay our technicians whether they're driving to an account or servicing the account, and we'll be able to build routes that minimize driving time," Fine says.

The company wouldn't comment on the cost of the Descartes software but did say that it expects to save 10% of the costs of labor and travel, which will pay for the Descartes software in two years.

The pilot installation of the RiMMS software will be completed by mid-September at a location that Fine declined to name. The rest of Sylvania's field locations will go live with the software early next year.