Working with workforce management specialist Toa Technologies, Dish Network has centralized its national workforce support operation.

Dish will use the system to better manage customer appointments, including more precise scheduling. Toa says its ETAdirect can accurately route more than 10,000 jobs in four minutes.

Dish installed Toa’s ETAdirect, a central cloud-based platform, to consolidate its technical field service operations, providing a unified view of field activity. The deployment took less than four months, the vendor said.

The system covers Dish employees, as well as third-party users, including field technicians, dispatchers, service representatives and managers – approximately 16,000 people.

Technicians working for Dish will all be equipped with tablets running Toa’s HTML5-based app, called ETAdirect Mobility.

TOA claims the new system has allowed Dish to:

• Reduce national field routing plans from 130 hours to 20 hours a day.
• Decrease technician overtime by more than two hours per week.
• Successfully integrate with 35 other internal systems, including billing and CRM.
• Receive 24 updates to the system without a major upgrade.

Erik Carlson, executive vice president of Dish Network Service, said: “Toa’s ETAdirect enables us to predictably and instantly manage our large fleet of field technicians to accurately alert customers of arrival times and to limit the length of their in-home appointment. Through our partnership with Toa Technologies, we’re bridging the gap between field service and customer service.”