Description
Why Location Benchmarking (Service Center Travel Time)?
An important part of service centers is their location relationship with the field service area. Benchmarking travel time provides quantiative data on how well your facilities are located within your coverage areas. Leading utilities are optimizing the number and location of service centers to balance customer service and cost management.
Location analysis is a key part of service center planning because each facility is typically part of an extensive network of field operations headquarters. Consolidation / decentralization issues such as travel times need to be considered in the service center plan to achieve the appropriate balance for each situation. The key is having the right facilities in the right place. This means that service networks supporting field forces need to balance travel times with facility locations. (Note: with changes in operations it is becoming more about cost than response time – read more about service center facility trends.)
By utilizing travel times and workload modeling, from meter locations, service center location benchmarking can help you with your facility planning:
- to support the need for a new service center location.
- to identify the need to consolidate existing service centers.
- support the business case to make needed facility upgrades (invest in current locations).
- provide operating groups with optimum trip time modeled staffing levels by service center.
- rate case applications justifying new facilities or facility consolidation programs
How we perform the benchmarking
This information has previously only been available as a part of long range service center planning consulting assignments. This benchmarking provides a much more affordable option for you to quantify the value of your service centers locations and understand how you compare with industry peers to determine if such a planning study is required.
We do a custom analysis with your data and then compare the results with our similar historical data from studies for other utility companies. The nature of this program is that all participants’ data is anonymous. You receive a custom report with your data and the comparison (click graphic for example).
What is Required?
Service Center Location Benchmarking is priced by large (> 1M customers) and small service areas. Contact us to discuss separate studies for multiple operating companies with overlapping service territories (say gas and electric).
Service Center Location Benchmarking will require the following information:
- Company name and Contact person
- List of locations and addresses or lat/long
- Map of your service territory
- Data file of geographic coordinates for meter locations (can discuss alternative data options)
Does your company have more than 1 million customers? See Service Center Location Benchmarking (1+ Million Customers)
Want help with long range facility planning? See Strategic/Long Range Service Center Planning