On the value and challenge of remote assistance in on-field operations

The skilled labor shortage is expected to become increasingly critical in the near future. While this issue affects various industries, the repair and maintenance sector is particularly impacted. Companies operating in this industry face significant challenges in hiring sufficient skilled labor to maintain their daily service operations. Throughout the day, technicians spend a significant portion of their working hours traveling to customer sites, which reduces their effective utilization for completing tasks. Initial efforts to address this challenge have emerged in the form of remote assistance solutions. In the context of service operations, junior technicians with less working experience visit customers with service requests on-site, while expert technicians remain at a central hub, providing real-time assistance remotely to their colleagues in the field. Accordingly, a decision-maker needs to determine and synchronize the daily schedules for both on-site and expert technicians to, as assumed in our work, minimize the working time for expert technicians. Although some literature discusses technical implementations, the emerging business concept and its operational planning have received little attention. We introduce and model the problem by providing effective heuristic planning solutions via Hexaly. Given the limited availability of experts, our approach improves the utilization of their working hours. Compared to scenarios without remote assistance, our results indicate that scarce expert resources can be reduced and replaced by additional junior technicians performing on-site visits. The benefits of remote assistance are particularly evident in rural regions, where customer sites are widely spread, and in operations with rather short service times.