At Mitsuiwa, Customer Engineers (CE) respond to more than 1,000 customer requests (including maintenance personnel, security guards, caregivers, and more) every month. In the past, an operator would receive a request, refer to the personnel’s skills and schedule, and then contact multiple by phone or e-mail to find a match, taking an average of 30 minutes per case to complete. When working at the customer’s location or on the move, the personnel were often not available to take a call. This meant the operators had to contact them again and again, resulting in frustration for CEs and a longer response time for customers.
In addition, due to the national decrease in the working population caused by the declining birthrate and aging population, it is difficult to hire more operators and maintenance personnel to quickly respond to issues.
The Real-Time Dispatch System was developed to optimize operations within a limited workforce and resolve these challenges.
Mitsuiwa is now able to select candidates by matching their skills, schedule, and current locations, to decide on the correct responders in a much shorter period of time. This resulted in a much shorter time between an incident occurring and the CEs arrival at a destination, reducing the average time required to arrange personnel from 30 minutes to 10 minutes per case.
The Real-time Dispatch System not only reduces the workload of the operators, but also the response time for customers. By automatically matching and dispatching the closest engineer with the right skillset, the real-time system improves work efficiency, enhances the customer experience, and increases customer satisfaction.
In an aging country like Japan, businesses are often faced with labor shortages. The Real-time Dispatch System automates the manual work for the operators, improving productivity so that Mitsuiwa can serve a larger network of customers with fewer dispatch centers. The system can also be applied to other operations such as security guards or caregivers to help with limited workforce issues.