David Lock

Just has an electricity board chap in to change a meter. The guy said he covered a large area of the SW but his day was set out for him by doing the jobs as they came in taking no account of where they were in his region. So a sort of inefficient zig-zag approach

Can you imagine a courier company working like this? They wouldn't last 5 minutes

David

SiPie

Seems to be quite a common approach these days as our works printer engineers operated the same way for a while

Until they realised the grief it was causing the engineers

richs2891

Does not suprise me in the slightest - probaly have call allocators who can not drive, have no basic common sense and dont know or care about the cost of fuel or how to do plan a route short of quoting google maps. Or even care, so long as it out of there job queue
Oh hang on that was the call allocator in my previous role who was off for 3 weks with stress as she did exactly the same.

Richard

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

They do the same reading meters. Makes no sense. Turn up in a Corsa, reads the meter (or tries to), then jumps in and drives off to some other random location.

Ok people won't be in at certain times, but its still daft.

And whats worse, they arereplacing meters with hand read ones...why not fit the slightly more expensive one that can actually be read from the pavement without having enter the property or open a meter box?

I suppose they have to justify their price increases somehow

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

To think, in IT at school( yes school - GCSE, not college) We ran simulation software/game sponsored by BT which handled the management and allocation of jobs. "priority" I think it was called, and ran on a Acorn A3000 .

Quite a addictive actually, bit like Sim City.

Wurzel

iTrader: (1)

We don't have meter readers here, they send you a card where you can either fill it in and post it back prepaid or you can log in to a website and type in your readings. This is for both water and electricity. Seems a far simpler approach than having people bomb around the country trying to read meters.

urban

iTrader: (1)

Well in N.Ireland someone is sent to an area to read meters.
If you're not in, then he leaves a card that you then use to read your own meter.

P1Fanatic

Reminds me of our facilities team at work. Raise an office fault in Reading and it gets sent to some dispatch team who then send it back to engineers based in the same building as me. For them to then walk around saying who raised this fault??? to which i reply "Do you have the name of the requestee"? No mate we dont get that info. Wtf???

Ant

This is how my job works, my route is planned out for me.

After cleared my job I get another.

It works for a few reasons. If I'm stuck on a big job they can a) inform the customer I'm running late or b) send another lad to cover it.

Also if a jOb comes in between my last and next one .

The route planners aren't daft out our place and they know their stuff so time isn't wasted.

David Lock

In fact the chap that called said that he got up a bit ttearlier every day to re-arrange his timetable to make it more sensible/less travel between jobs. But this will stop soon as - wait or it - a new computer system will ensure he works to the given schedule


d

joz8968

iTrader: (13)

"Computer says nooo."

tony de wonderful

There must be a way to do it remotely in this day and age?

Adrian F

i spent 10 years managing electricians doing responsive works and now 2 years client side and i would say the single biggest cause of this is trackers as now a admin person who has never worked the area now schedules works with out understanding the jobs so has no idea of what is involved

GlesgaKiss

Years ago a friend of mine worked for a firm like this. He'd do things like travel a hundred mile round trip just to pick up a tool he'd forgotten when he could have got on fine without it. It's ridiculous... from what I know he's still in the same job at the same level; no wonder! The management seemed to think that was normal behaviour, so it's difficult to feel any sympathy towards them.