Dedication versus Flexibility in Field Service Operations

Field service is gaining importance as after sales service is starting to be recognized as a major source of revenue. This motivates planning problems for companies that employ mobile technicians who provide service on clients’ sites. These planning problems share the common characteristic that service levels corresponding to technician response times are explicitly expressed in contracts. Moreover, lately, there is strong pressure from clients to have a single dedicated technician who takes full responsibility of the field service. In this paper, we provide models that enable the analysis of various trade-offs between service levels and operational costs under the dedicated service structure. We also investigate the tradeoffs between strict dedicated service and more flexible structures to understand the settings for which strict dedication is appropriate.