Since 2012, Eltel has run a ‘Day as a technician’ initiative in which Eltel office workers and managers spend one day per year working alongside technicians to better understand their day-to-day challenges.
“Management discussions around the initiative and potential productivity improvements resulted in us inviting three engineering students to spend 70 days with our technicians and create detailed daily reports,” explains Iisakki Koski, CFO at Eltel Finland. “We then drew on the findings of these reports to identify how we could improve the day-to-day productivity of our technicians.”
Better planning reduces both cost and environmental impact
The findings demonstrated that better planning procedures could enable Eltel’s technicians to work in a more productively, efficiently and safely manner. We also found a significant potential for optimisation of route planning which could reduce the driving kilometres and thus directly reducing our costs and CO2 emissions.
“It’s about optimising how every week – and even every day – is structured for individual technicians to ensure we have the right resources in the right place at the right time, and that we optimise productive time,” says Koski. “This could entail reducing unnecessary driving and emissions through more efficient planning, avoiding potential problems by ensuring that we have the right materials and equipment at a job site, and further ensuring that our technicians are in possession of the proper safety equipment in order to reduce safety risks.”
The findings demonstrated that better planning procedures could enable Eltel’s technicians to work in a more productively, efficiently and safely manner.
