Benchmarking the engineer availability process: A case study

Presents the main findings of an internal and generic benchmarking exercise on the engineer availability process. This process seeks to predict customer demand in terms of the incoming call rate and match this against the available supply of engineering resources. Describes how the internal benchmarking revealed considerable differences in the way in which the different internal business units managed their engineer availability process. Explains that the main reason for the difference was in the clustering of self‐managing work groups of engineers. Also points out that there are three main elements involved in ensuring the success of an engineer availability process: an accurate forecast of customer demand; a method of operating which yields an effective revision of supply to fit customer demand; and a high support environment.