March 2022 - Canalix

How do regulators achieve better resource planning in 2022? Advanced technology, automation, and AI are a solid base for enabling regulatory authorities to unleash their teams’ efficiency by assigning the right inspectors, time, and tools to an inspection job and ensuring that the plan will succeed even if a last-minute change occurs.

Inefficient management of costly resources can cost regulators valuable time and money. That is especially true when regulatory agencies enter a period with an increasing workload while the number of inspectors remains the same. Improving resource management efficiency via inspection software can help regulators take the enormous workload and tackle the potential issues that may come out of poorly managed resource scheduling and planning.

How does resource planning in government agencies look?

Resource planning in a regulatory agency is the process of categorising, scheduling and managing resources such as inspectors that do site visits to conduct inspection checks. The goal that every regulatory agency should have set is to orchestrate this process to guarantee that an inspection will take place at the right time and cost. The use of government resource scheduling software is a way to ensure that the regulator is using the public resources efficiently and productively.

Benefits of resource planning software for inspection team leaders

Inspection team leaders that use resource scheduling software as Jobtimizer report that they managed to improve productivity, inspection performance and cost optimisation thanks to it. Here are some practical examples of how Jobtimizer helped our UK government clients to achieve the goals they had set before contacting us:

They succeeded in improving their inspection tracking system by transforming how they look at their data. Jobtimizer allowed them to make resource planning more visual, and that way, they enabled themselves to start planning inspections better.

They saved time by letting Jobtimizer generate inspection schedules automatically. With the AI engine that considered all types of constraints and rules, inspection team leaders reported that they maximised their inspector’s time on work that matters.

They managed to reduce their carbon footprint by optimising the route planning between inspection jobs. That meant fewer costs spent on fuel and less time spent travelling for all of our clients.

Why the successful digital transformation in regulators starts with resource planning

If you have to plan inspection schedules by turning paper files into excel spreadsheets, you will likely miss opportunities. Making schedules manually on excel files will be a challenge to maximise your time on work that matters. And it will be even more difficult to track if the operational costs are going as per the budget plan because you will lack good visibility on data. These are all real problems that our clients had before adopting Jobtimizer.

By contrast, a few months after using the resource planning system of Jobtimizer, they shared that their team’s workload is better managed, as are also other KPIs.

Maximising efficiency with intelligent resource planning

Solely the use of resource planning software doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to find the sweet spot between over-allocation and under-allocation of resources. An over-allocation of inspectors leads to overtime and increased costs, while under-allocation means missed opportunities. No leader would like to invest in an inspection optimisation solution to find himself in the two situations mentioned above.

Modularity as the safest road to optimisation

Finding a way to transform inspection management efficiently can challenge regulators that use many tools in their existing inspection management system. But this challenge can be tackled with easy-to-integrate tools that focus on different areas of the inspection process (resource scheduling, data submission, AI complexity scoring, etc.).

Why is modularity crucial for your digital transformation strategy in 2022?

Download this whitepaper to understand:

- - - The advantages of modular digital transformation
    - The vital architectural practices and technologies that enable modular transformation
    - Migration strategies to minimize disruption for the business and customers
    - How Jobtimizer can help public sector organisations make the transition
    - How a regulatory agency in the UK is benefitting from a modular approach

Read it now.

Check out these inspection management tools for your next government digital transformation project step:

Regulatory Case Management software will support a lifecycle of ensuring compliance and supporting duty holders from registration, inspections, enforcement, and complaint management.
Resource scheduling software – Jobtimizer is a resource management software that optimises schedules and delivers immediate results. Because of the software’s modular nature, it can be easily integrated into an existing system. The benefits it offers: time-saving schedules, efficient resource management, and swift decision-making enable Jobtimizer’s users to have faster results from digital transformation than ever before.
Self-submission portals – inspection agencies can give their users more power by enabling them to self-service their inspection requests via intuitive self-submission portals.
The self-service inspection module of Canalix allows external users to register, initiate inspection case processes, follow their status and interact with the authority around their inspection cases. Also, case information and documentation can be securely shared with external stakeholders such as subject matter experts, interested parties or other authorities.

Adopt a resource planning software for your next inspection

It’s good practice to think about resource planning and resource allocation optimisation even before thinking about digital transformation itself. You can visit our Solutions page and look at our inspection optimisation tools.

For regulatory agencies, the investment in highly qualified inspectors is perhaps the most valuable. However, this investment may lose some of its value if there are scheduling issues. That’s why many regulators choose to invest also in good inspection software as a solution to optimise operational costs and cut spending caused by frequent rework or downtime in qualified inspectors’ schedules. So there come the question: how to reduce rework for inspectors? And also:

How do downtime impacts operational costs?

How reducing downtime can help regulatory agencies optimise their spending? If your regulatory agency has only one highly qualified inspector with certification in Explosives, it will be more expensive for you to have his schedule filled with time gaps. If, because of the time gaps, the inspector doesn’t spend the entirety of his time on work that matters, catching up at the end of the month will be more expensive and may hurt his productivity. If the efficiency of processes starts suffering because of lousy scheduling, a new inspection check may be required much sooner than planned. So the price of a single inspection check may become more pricey than initially planned.

On the other hand, with a well-built inspection scheduling software ( one that makes optimal schedules with minimum travel time between jobs), the efficiency of the process can be improved, and the necessity for rework and overtime work minimised. That will ultimately lead to lowering operational costs. And last but not least, by not having to conduct emergency rework and overtime, the regulator can use more opportunities.

Simplify the resource scheduling procedures

If the inspection scheduling process has issues, it’s normal not to have expected results. Desk workers can give feedback on the problems they have with inspection scheduling. One of our clients is a national regulator in the UK. They asked for feedback from their workers, and that’s how they realised that the inspection scheduling process requires the automation of repetitive tasks.

After adopting our resource scheduling software Jobtimizer, their scheduling managers sped up their work and reduced the errors in their tasks. Download our case to see how our resource scheduling software Jobtimzier helped a regulator reduce time spend on manual scheduling with up to 75%:

CASE STUDY: How a regulatory agency cut costs with resource scheduling software?

- - - - reducing the scheduling time with up to 75%
      - increasing efficiency of operations with 40%
      - fully eliminating errors in the resource allocation process.

Download the case study.

Follow the compliance standards.

When conducting an inspection check, inspectors must follow compliance standards and measure the risk for future hazards to get an accurate risk score. That is valuable data that may play a significant role in scheduling future inspection checks. If the risk score is low, the follow-up inspection may be scheduled further in time or appointed as a remote inspection. But if the risk score is high, the following inspection check may have to be scheduled sooner.

If the inspector is handling the inspection checks with tons of paper, it’s easy to miss an essential procedure and forget to check a box in the inspection checklists. Our client avoided these issues by using our inspection management platform Canalix and conducting inspection checks with a tablet. By giving inspectors the required tools and system, they can easily follow and maintain high compliance standards.

Faster response on emergency requests

Sometimes an emergency event may require an inspection check earlier than scheduled. In these instances, our tool Jobtimizer triggers automatic scheduling that prioritises the emergency request over other appointed events, and automatically reshuffles the rest of the schedules to avoid conflicts.

Use the right inspection management system

Not every resource management software is a good fit for a regulator. Government agencies have specific needs, and using a particular purpose-built inspection management software is always better than using some generic, customisable solution. The right inspection software can help regulators automate repetitive tasks and record and store data in the right way that can further be used for visualising patterns and other data.

The data collected by inspection management software like Canalix can help you keep track of how many inspection checks were completed for a period of time and observe how your government agency managed to cut costs with time.

Why Jobtimizer is the right resource scheduling tool for your government agency?

Jobtimizer is a stand-alone module to the Canalix Inspection Management platform. Jobtimizer provides a configurable and extendable AI-based scheduling engine that allows scheduling constraints and business priorities to be defined.

Constraints can be classified as ‘Hard’ where they need to be fulfilled and ‘Soft’ where it’s desirable that these are met, but not a must for a schedule to be viable. The emphasis or importance placed on a soft constraint is defined by providing each constraint with a score. A typical example of a hard constraint is ‘resource availability”, “availability of required equipment”, and “qualifications or skills” required to perform the job. A typical example of a soft constraint would be job priority, FIFO, and total distance across a scheduled work program.

Book a demo here.

How to achieve better resource planning in government agency?