Major Enhancements: Skedulo Mastermind & Dynamic Messaging Availability

Research shows that 60% of deskless workers feel their job has become more difficult since COVID-19, while 72% of IT executives claim worker productivity is negatively impacted by their existing technology.

Despite these challenges, the majority of the working population remains optimistic about the future of work, with 59% of technology executives citing the capabilities of emerging technologies as the primary source for their optimism.

This context serves as the perfect introduction to announce two exciting developments for the Skedulo Deskless Productivity Cloud: Skedulo MasterMind enhancements and the availability of Dynamic Messaging.

Enhancements to Skedulo MasterMind for Scheduling Automation

Skedulo MasterMind is the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) powered optimization service that enables users to optimize their workforce scheduling around the priorities and variables that matter most—including workforce utilization, cost, and travel time. 

The MasterMind enhancements enable you to automate scheduling based on user-defined variables so scheduling decisions are made smarter and faster. Specifically, the enhancements to MasterMind include the introduction of MasterMind solvers, a series of out-of-the-box configurable algorithms that allow schedulers to shape the weighting of a variety of factors. They’re then able to achieve the desired optimization for a given scheduling scenario.

For instance, if reducing travel time between sites is the top priority, MasterMind will automatically produce a schedule that accommodates that objective. If minimizing the operating costs around your workforce is most critical, MasterMind will quickly build a scheduling scenario for you that takes that into consideration.

This overhaul of Skedulo MasterMind offers a completely new approach to how AI, ML, and algorithms are applied to a growing number of complex scenarios. Rather than relying on single-pass greedy heuristics or overnight batch processing, individual MasterMind Solvers are oriented toward specific scheduling challenges, such as shift scheduling, route optimization, and on-demand/real-time business models. An additional AI layer observes patterns of how these solvers provide outcomes over time and progressively tunes solvers to be faster and more efficient.

Ultimately, that allows you to measurably improve your operations and significantly reduce travel time, distance, and cost-per-hour—all while maximizing work capacity, increasing workforce utilization, and best matching worker and job attributes.

Skedulo MasterMind in The Real World

The enhancements to Skedulo MasterMind sound great on paper, but how do they translate to reality? Let’s consider a scenario where you’re responsible for scheduling a workforce of 200 mobile workers that travel to a number of job sites throughout a given day.

The challenge is that you have a complex network of appointments, workers (often called “resources” in scheduler speak), and geographically distributed sites. You may even have the added complexity of different types of jobs and different types of workers, each with unique attributes, skills, certifications, and preferences.

The scheduling process becomes quite complicated. Now imagine you have 2,000 mobile workers, instead of 200. The prospect of scheduling a week’s worth of work for 2,000 mobile employees is high volume of manual work, and the expectation of a team of humans perfectly optimizing the schedule on their own is unfair.

But at Skedulo, we know that optimizing a schedule is essentially solving a complex math equation. Very advanced math—but math all the same. That’s where the MasterMind routing solver comes in. The MasterMind solver will incorporate priorities defined by schedulers, such as minimizing workers’ travel time—effectively maximizing the amount of working time for each worker—and will then produce an optimized schedule based on those inputs. Quickly. 

What’s the ultimate impact of this optimization? While it varies based on the optimization scenario, Skedulo MasterMind can help decrease travel time and increase the average working time for each worker, and reduce your average operating cost per hour.

We’re very excited to see Skedulo MasterMind continue to develop and share more details soon!

Dynamic Messaging Will Be Available Soon!

Additionally, Skedulo has announced the general availability of Dynamic Messaging, an instant messaging service available to both deskless workers and their operations teams natively within the Skedulo web and mobile applications.

Skedulo Dynamic Messaging empowers organizations with deskless workers to bridge communication gaps through a powerful messaging solution to share job details, solve for real-time work challenges, and address escalations, all within the Skedulo Deskless Productivity Cloud.

Dynamic Messaging allows you to:

• Engage your mobile teams – Empower your workforce with instant connectivity to the resources they need
• Centralize communications – Reduce misinformation between workers and retain commentary on completed work
• Facilitate knowledge sharing – Boost internal knowledge retention for a sustainable competitive advantage

Improve customer satisfaction – Properly equip mobile workers to interact meaningfully with customers every single time

Where can I learn more?

Learn more about the powerful capabilities of Skedulo Dynamic Messaging, and stay tuned  for more information on Skedulo MasterMind as we continue to introduce enhancements and MasterMind solvers.

We’re beyond excited with our ongoing investments in the Skedulo Deskless Productivity Cloud and the opportunity to better serve you and your deskless workforce!