Korea Telecom South Korea
Download (PDF, 124 KB)

"After introducing a workforce scheduling system based on ILOG Constraint Programming, it became possible to process workforce scheduling in almost real time based on many criteria. This automated workforce scheduling system is one of the key backend systems of the KT NeOSS system, playing an important role in gaining recognition for its capabilities at the TeleManagement Forum 2007."

Yoon Dong Sik General Manager KT NeOSS Global OSS Development Team Korea Telecom

Business
Korea Telecom (KT), the largest common carrier in South Korea, is creating cutting-edge technologies that go well beyond world-class broadband technology. South Korea’s top integrator of wired and wireless communications systems for more than 25 years, KT is a leader in broadband services. Since launching the world’s first broadband service (WiBro), KT has paved the way for U-Korea, a ubiquitous communications infrastructure that enables people to share information wherever they are.

Application
KT included its workforce management system in the company’s New Operation Support Systems (NeOSS) initiative to move from manual processes to automated systems, and reduce its number of mission-critical applications from 62 to 36. The company not only automated the workforce system, but geared it to optimize its scheduling with ILOG Constraint Programming (CP), whose modules: ILOG Solver, ILOG Scheduler and ILOG Dispatcher, tackle all types of scheduling and logistics problems.

The new system takes into account the work policies and the proficiency of each workforce. It processes orders in near real time, shortening time to service, improving customer satisfaction, reducing labor costs and maximizing return on investment (ROI).

Goal
Telecom customers want the best service and the latest technology: total mobility, multimedia cell phones, the fastest modems, pervasive access to the Internet—the list is long and growing, making service fulfillment increasingly complex for phone companies. KT used to rely on a largely manual workforce management system for assigning field workers. As the company’s market grew in size and complexity, the scheduling system became increasingly inadequate. It took almost a day to allocate over 250,000 work orders to 2,200 onsite workers, and the time taken to schedule the work frequently exceeded the time spent doing the work.

Results
With the new ILOG CP-based system, the entire workforce schedule can be redone in a matter of minutes, and all the constraints, including work policies and skill matching, are still respected. KT has experienced several benefits with ILOG CP optimization at the core of the new workforce scheduling system, such as maximized utilization of the company’s workforce, more responsive customer service, automatic balancing of customer demands with labor costs, productivity and employee satisfaction, reduced employee grievances, and increased productivity by deploying multi-skilled employees more efficiently.

Technical
ILOG developed CP in order to solve difficult scheduling and routing problems. Although math is used to help find the correct search path from several choices, ILOG CP is based primarily on computer science fundamentals, such as logic programming and graph theory.

ILOG CP is invaluable when dealing with the complexity of many real-world sequencing, scheduling or routing problems. Whether you are scheduling people, machines or process steps; if you are dispatching trucks for freight delivery or technicians for cable installation, ILOG CP finds efficient solutions when there are several individual sequence and timing constraints. It then works to improve the solution until nothing better can be found.