September 30, 2024

Stratus Data Enhances Technician Quality of Life and Reduces Costs for Examinetics

Examinetics provides on-site medical screening and industrial hygiene consulting for more than 3000 companies in 18,000 locations across the contiguous United States. They have helped companies comply with occupational safety regulations and protect the health of their workforce since 1968.

When CEO Paul Fenaroli joined Examinetics in 2019, he began looking for a way to increase scheduling reliability and efficiency to bring down transportation and overtime costs without decreasing bookings or increasing pressure on the company’s team of nationally distributed technicians, who are vulnerable to burnout given the travel-intensive nature of their work.

In late 2023, Fenaroli reached out to his advisor at a private equity firm with the idea of engaging an analytics firm to revamp the company’s approach to scheduling.

Fenaroli and the firm worked together to hire Stratus Data to optimize Examinetics’s complex auditory technician routing process and build scale into the business model without sacrificing employees’ quality of life.

Challenges: Right Place, Right Time, Right Technician, Right Equipment

Examinetics relies on a team of schedulers assigned to defined regions of the country to route technicians and testing equipment, whether in tandem or separately, to clients when needed. Scheduling is a dynamic process, requiring schedulers to put technicians on site to fulfill work orders of various sizes for far flung clients that often use shift work schedules and require testing outside of standard business hours.

Scheduling efficiency could not come at the expense of either booking fewer clients or keeping technicians on the road for more consecutive days. Examinetics must also comply with all Department of Transportation driver safety requirements when moving equipment to client sites.

Adding to the challenge was the state of the data. Where it existed, available data was fragmented across multiple systems and often manually curated. Coordination across scheduling regions was limited, generating significant inefficiencies in border areas. Seeing the full picture was impossible for even the most experienced schedulers, who often had to rely on instinct, especially when last-minute scheduling changes arose.

“There was a healthy degree of skepticism that we would find anything,” recalls Fenaroli. “Every quarter for the four years I’ve been here, we’ve asked, ‘What can we do with scheduling?’ You can talk yourself into the conclusion that it’s too complex to systematize.”
– Paul Fenaroli, CEO of Examinetics

Solution:

Stratus Data deployed a team to Overland, Kansas, for a three-day on-site visit, spending significant time with the schedulers to understand their existing processes, what information they use to build schedules, and what disruptions they frequently face.

“Stratus Data spent a lot of time understanding the hard constraints and the soft constraints,” says Fenaroli. “They peeled back the onion of how the process works and understood the places where there were opportunities to improve. It gave us the feeling they were business people, not just quant jocks.”

After scoping the problem, Stratus focused on technician routing optimization in order to realize the business goals of more nights at home for technicians, reduced travel distances, fewer flights, reduced overtime and an overall reduction of costs.

The custom optimization algorithm Stratus developed allowed for an approach to scheduling that balances competing priorities while breaking down the regional scheduling silos to route technicians more flexibly, while improving working conditions by letting technicians spend less time in the air, on the road, and away from home.

The algorithm equips the scheduling team with a powerful tool that rapidly combs through fifteen septillion1 possible routing solutions, managing trade-offs by keeping all variables in play throughout the course of the computational cycle. Inspired in part by the techniques Examinetics schedulers apply to their local data sets, the optimization allows the schedulers to collaborate across a nationwide data pool to see the biggest possible picture.

Results:

Stratus Data validated the complexity of the scheduling process, and demonstrated that improvements were possible through the application of mathematical modeling to improve reliability and efficiency. Technician routing optimization resulted in a projected 6.6-15.6% improvement on each of the goal metrics defined by Examinetics, unlocking increased profits thanks to an intelligent algorithm that manages all of the trade-offs that come into play when your business involves moving highly-skilled people across the country. The combination of reduced costs and improved quality of life for technicians promises to pay off both immediately and over time. Stratus Data’s approach showed that, against the odds, it was possible to make real across-the-board improvements without sacrificing one goal in pursuit of another.

“We’ve got something that is appropriately simple, but will add value quickly,” notes the private equity fund’s representative. “If a company has a problem that can be solved with algorithms, but nobody’s ever solved it before in a productized way, I would 100% recommend Stratus.”

Following the initial demonstration of the technician routing optimization algorithm, Examinetics was able to identify new areas of their operation to monitor, and realized immediate process improvements by implementing new procedures for altering planned schedules.

“Stratus Data has both IQ and EQ in spades,” says Fenaroli. “On the IQ side, there’s no substitute for brilliant thinking and brilliant people. And on the EQ side, there’s the sensitivity to the organization and how it exists in its ecosystem. It’s a combination that really sets them apart.”

1 15,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s a 15 followed by twenty-four zeros. At a billion routes a second, we’d have to start computing before the dinosaur age to complete that analysis!

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