Fieldforce operations are under increasing pressure to deliver more work at lower costs due to economic and regulatory pressures. However, they must balance these demands for increased productivity with the need to keep workers safe in a hazardous work environment.
Fieldwork companies often feel like the balance is impossible to achieve. Either they are giving up productivity to keep workers safe, or they are compromising safety to improve productivity.
Fortunately, a new approach to safety and productivity makes this old balancing act a challenge of the past. FYLD is an AI-powered fieldforce operations tool that increases real-time visibility of the entire fieldwork process.
This visibility acts like a rising tide in the harbour. Just like all the ships in the harbour rise to the new water level, both safety and productivity improve with better field force operations visibility.
The crucial foundation of complete visibility
Lack of visibility of field jobs contributes to negative performance in both safety and productivity:
Safety: Traditional paper-based site risk assessments are only filed at the end of the shift – if ever. This delay in visibility means that supervisors and safety professionals only get to see the hazards and control measures after the job is complete. They have no opportunity to provide input into the job safety before the team executes the work and so cannot prevent injury occurring. Instead, their expertise is limited to investigating incidents after someone has already been hurt.
Productivity: Field supervisors oversee numerous sites simultaneously, generally applying a ‘sampling’ style approach about where they should focus attention. Supervisors are not armed with the tools to prioritise between their jobs without accurate information and where they could make the most impact. As a result, productivity suffers due to a lack of fieldwork visibility. Jobs are frequently abandoned before completion.
The value of optimisation
Having detailed and holistic information available in real time on FYLD helps managers optimise field force operations as a whole. Optimising for safety also improves productivity, and optimising for productivity also improves safety:
Safety: FYLD allows supervisors and safety professionals to provide input to point-of-work risk assessments before the job starts, and as the day’s operations progress. This enables them to add their expertise and experience to prevent an injury rather than investigate one. Incident investigations stop jobs from progressing and tie up valuable resources. Avoiding an injury, therefore, helps productivity.
Productivity: One of the barriers to productivity is the absence of the right tool or equipment for a job. The field team must wait for the equipment to arrive, which causes the job to take longer than expected. Frequently, field teams use workarounds to keep their task moving. However, these abnormal work processes often introduce new hazards with an increased risk of injury. Therefore, solving the productivity challenge will lower the risk of an injury.
Evidence from the field
Our customers are experiencing extensive productivity gains due to FYLD’s AI optimisation. In the past 12 months, seven of FYLD’s customers have:
Completed over 80,000 Visual Risk Assessments (VRAs), creating, on average, an efficiency of over 13,000 hours / £260k savings per customer
Experienced significant ROI – 6x has been demonstrated through all six-week trials undertaken, many trials have substantially higher ROI
Accumulated a total efficiency benefit worth of £4.8m – from fine reduction, time efficiencies using FYLD features and interactions between customer departments
Resulted in time efficiency savings of over 20,000 hours using core FYLD features.
FYLD powers safety and productivity
FYLD has consistently helped our customers make significant improvements in safety performance, as well as impressive productivity gains. Contact FYLD to learn more about how our AI-powered technology can help you make a step change in your field force productivity.