Grant: Engage Plus Grants Program

Access Communications is a cable television and telecommunications provider serving over 240 communities*in Saskatchewan. These communities are widely spread across the province, spanning a large geographic area.*One of the main functions for technical operations at Access Communications is to respond to customer*requests, service issues and to provide preventive maintenance measures. During the first NSERC Engage*grant, we developed optimization models that can be used by Access Communications to find optimal*schedules and routing for service technicians that reduce drive time and enhance customer service. We also*developed a strategic optimization model that can be used to advise the company on the number of full time*technicians that they should hire at the beginning of the planning horizon based on historical needs and the cost*of outsourcing services using third party contractors. Those models need to be integrated to the company's*online booking and technician workforce management systems.*Our goal is first to enhance the models we developed by considering time windows and to find the optimal time*window for each area along with the cost associated with those time windows. This is expected to improve*Access Communications' customer service. Then, we would like to monitor the integration process for the*optimization models we developed into the company internal systems. We also plan to test and calibrate the*models by creating a pilot area which will use our decision support optimization models to schedule and rout*technicians. These new scheduling and routing systems are expected to decrease the company operational costs*related to service technicians. It will also improve the customer service experience.