Overview
Many field service providers (FSPs) experience demanding and ever-changing customer requirements, inefficiencies arising from inadequate manual service dispatch processes and unpredictable traffic situations. With AI-enabled technologies improving service dispatch efficiency, they can better meet customer expectations.
Alibaba Cloud’s EasyDispatch solution – named in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms – uses the latest reinforcement learning AI technology to improve field service dispatch capabilities and efficiency, helping FSPs fulfill customers’ service scheduling and rescheduling requirements in real time.
Service Highlights
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Industry-Leading Real-Time AI Dispatch
This solution uses advanced Reinforcement Learning AI technology to implement real-time, AI-informed decision support for service dispatch - enhancing field service efficiency when compared to traditional AI solutions.
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Logistics Expertise
Our service dispatch algorithms are trained on logistics industry best-practices developed by Cainiao Network, the logistics arm of Alibaba Group.
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Robust Cloud Platform
Alibaba Cloud’s robust cloud-native platform provides the reliability, scalability, security, high performance, operational excellence, and cost optimization for your service dispatch system needs. Alibaba Cloud’s Platform for AI continuously improves algorithm quality.
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Quick Implementation
By allowing your teams to develop machine learning models with zero coding, this solution allows you to turn your domain experts into data scientists with little effort. With highly scalable, modular architectures, you can quickly replicate a service dispatch system to other regions on a weekly basis.
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Get Professional SupportApplicable Scenarios
Logistics
Vehicle/Fleet Dispatch for Parcel Delivery
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E-Commerce
Parcel Distribution and
Delivery
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Professional Service
Home TV and Broadband Installation and Repair
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Public Utility
Patrol Equipment Dispatch
to Engineers
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How It Works
Challenges:
Traditional AI solutions have only limited capability to model complicated and everchanging business rules. Planning routes on a map for thousands of tasks is also a complex activity, particularly when real-time traffic situations and precise location requirements are involved. Balancing customer requirements and overall field service efficiency can also prove challenging.
Solution:
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This solution uses AI technology incorporating reinforcement learning to tackle these problems, with algorithms trained and improved during tasks to achieve optimal results within predefined business restrictions, and to evolve with changing business circumstances.
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· Real Time Dispatching is based on three types of dispatching algorithms: heuristic, optimization, reinforcement learning.
· Flexible Business Rule Pluginsmaximize compatibility with your business requirements.
· Commonly-used FSM tools from FSPs are included in EasyDispatch algorithms.
· Explainable AI enables ‘what-if’ analysis through drag-and-drop. You can implement new business rules to ensure agility by adding attributes to the AI.
· A full set of REST API and API documents, and a popular map engine.
Challenges:
Scheduling tasks manually is inefficient and does not enable rapid response to changing business circumstances, compromising the end-customer experience. Resource waste causes additional costs.
Solution:
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Hundreds of dedicated planners schedule and allocate tasks based on requests, expertise and schedules of technicians, existing assignments, and business rules incorporated into system parameters. Rules-based management and monitoring is executed throughout business processes to reduce risks and boost efficiency.
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· Improves task dispatch efficiency by up to 90% and reduces on-site travel time
· Enhances on-site service quality
· Reduces manpower and material costs
Talk to Big Data Experts About EasyDispatch for Field Service Management
Get Professional SupportFive Steps to Implement EasyDispatch for Field Service
Step 1: Business and Data Design
EasyDispatch provides a standard data mode and dispatch algorithms for typical Field Service Management scenarios. Alibaba Cloud can help customers align their business operations, systems and data definitions to EasyDispatch standard business entities definitions and identify gaps to achieve seamless, automated dispatch.
Step 2: Implementation and Integration
EasyDispatch provides a standard interface with Restful API to enable customers and partners to integrate external systems, with Alibaba Cloud mid-end team consulting services available to help integrate data as required. Once data integration is completed, default algorithms can plan jobs automatically. Alibaba Cloud certified partners or our mid-end team can deliver the customizations needed to align with customers’ business rules.
Step 3: DevOps Support
This solution offers a CI/CD tool called Yunxiao that leverages Alibaba Cloud’s DevOps expertise and capabilities to deliver end-to-end collaboration services and R&D tools that cover all stages of the product life cycle, from requirements and development to testing, release operation and maintenance. You can directly edit scripts to configure environment variables and pipelines and, once a pipeline is edited, you can release and rollback on the pipeline. Algorithm images compiled on Yunxiao are stored on the ACR and Yunxiao will notify you when you get the latest image to complete deployment updates.
Step 4: Project Delivery
Alibaba Cloud products have a comprehensive testing system that incorporates comprehensive functional regression testing spanning data, algorithms, and engineering. Alibaba Cloud can design test scenarios, complete systematic testing, and provide test reports based on different business rules and forms, especially for algorithm regression testing. In addition, the Alibaba Cloud Delivery Team’s expertise in project management efficiently supports international customers' agile delivery methods to respond to frequent requirement changes.
Step 5: Continuous Support
This solution gives an inspector scripts to quantify the real-time impact of the AI service dispatch algorithm, allowing you to quickly check the algorithm’s impact on overall efficiency and whether AI service dispatch results meet business expectations. This inspector can also facilitate regression testing during algorithm iterations for future algorithm optimization.
Step 6: Simplified Management Based on Generative AI
You can combine a vector database - such as Alibaba Cloud AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL - and a large language model (LLM) to build a chat-style plugin for EasyDispatch that helps create and manage delivery tasks without the need for manual operations. This plugin can provide personalized and accurate responses to customer inquiries, and create and manage delivery tasks automatically with optimized routing to improve logistics efficiency and performance.
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Get Professional SupportSecurity and Compliance
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CSA STAR
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ISO 27001
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ISO 27701
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PCI DSS
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SOC2 Type II Report
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C5