The engineer availability process: A study of a predictive process

Outlines the main findings of a study of a process in a major organization (involved in the servicing of capital equipment) which seeks to predict customer demand for service calls and match these against engineering resources. The process is called the engineer availability process (EAP) and has been examined in two geographical areas of the host company. Among the findings is that, no matter what means are used to predict demand, there is always a need for a flexible revision of supply. This revision can be met between formal and informal clustering of engineers. The former delivers a consistent output of jobs per day across a clustered team whereas with informal clustering, the distribution across teams is less consistent and puts greater pressure on individual teams to match supply and demand.