Customer Case · Nomadia Field Service Management
Culligan Targets +12% Productivity and -10% Travel Time with Nomadia Field Service as Part of Its Optiservice Project
The Optiservice Project's Quantified Targets
Culligan: The Competitive Advantage of Service That Complicates Routes
A leader in water treatment for more than 75 years, Culligan has been present in France since 1960 with 70 water shops, 1,100 employees, and approximately €90M revenue. The company stands out through a unique competitive advantage in its sector: it is the only player offering a complete service offering — maintenance, installation, delivery — in addition to manufacturing and selling its products.
But this asset comes at a price. It creates considerable logistics complexity for the 230 mobile resources spread across three distinct business lines (Residential, Water Dispensers, C&I), with very different intervention constraints depending on the profile. To address this challenge, Culligan launched Optiservice — a national transformation project — and chose Nomadia Field Service Management as the backbone of its scheduling.
Initiated in 2011, Optiservice was born from the realization that a major overhaul of the scheduling system was needed to fully optimize technician activities. This large-scale project involves deep changes at three levels simultaneously:
Two Business Lines, Two Distinct Logistics Challenges
- 130 technicians + 30 installers to manage
- 80% recurring interventions (servicing 1-2x/year)
- 30% deferrals following customer absence notices
- Emergency repairs to integrate into existing routes
- 2.3 million km traveled in 2012
- 95% recurring interventions (3 services/year/dispenser)
- Dispenser servicing combined with water delivery
- High frequency of weekly deliveries
- Minimum number of carboys required per delivery
- Multi-skilled technicians: delivery + installer + technician
The Challenges Before Nomadia Field Service
- Paper diaries with no shared visibility: technician schedules were managed on paper, with no centralized view for local planners or for head office — making it impossible to harmonize practices across 34 dealerships.
- No geographical route optimization: the 230 mobile resources traveled without optimized itineraries, generating unnecessary kilometers — 2.3 million km/year for the Residential business line alone.
- 30% of customer deferrals not efficiently re-integrated: when a customer was absent at the time of a visit notice, the manual management of the deferral disrupted the entire schedule without any automatic absorption mechanism.
- Urgent repairs difficult to integrate: inserting an emergency repair call into an already full route required complex manual arbitrations, at the expense of productivity and customer satisfaction.
- Heterogeneous practices across dealerships: without a centralized and harmonized system, each dealership operated autonomously with its own methods, making internal benchmarking and best-practice sharing impossible.
Nomadia Field Service + Territory Manager: A Tailored Solution for Culligan
Following a successful pilot at the Val d'Oise dealership, Nomadia Field Service was integrated into the Optiservice project for national rollout. Culligan also uses Nomadia Territory Manager to sectorize its territory — both tools working in concert for optimal coverage of the 34 dealerships.
Automatic calculation of the best available time slots for all 230 mobile resources, with rolling visibility of over one month of scheduling.
Customer availability, technician leave, home location, skills, vehicle payload, intervention type — all configured in the tool.
Deferrals automatically re-integrated into available schedules; urgent repairs inserted without disrupting existing routes thanks to colour-coded rescheduling.
All data consolidated on a central server: delivery note tracking, performance monitoring, stock management across all 34 dealerships.
Thanks to Nomadia FSM's ergonomics, branch planners directly manage technician schedules and invoicing, without head office dependency.
Optimized territory sectorization around each dealership for coherent geographical coverage and geographically efficient routes.
Optiservice was born from the realization that a major overhaul of our system was needed to fully optimize the activities of our technicians. It is an ambitious project involving deep changes at multiple levels, but we found service providers who listened closely to our needs and quickly convinced our teams of the system's effectiveness.
The Benefits Experienced by Culligan
Optimized itineraries for each mobile resource, reducing unnecessary travel across the 2.3M annual km of the Residential business line.
Real-time time slot proposals to customers, with the best options based on technicians' actual availability and location.
Delivery notes centralized at head office, complete traceability of Water Dispenser routes, and minimum carboys per delivery enforced.
Visibility over dealership stock levels from head office, enabling better supply chain anticipation and reduction of out-of-stock situations.
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Workload Control and Kilometer Reduction
Culligan now has full control over the workload of each of its 230 mobile resources. Optimized itineraries reduce kilometers traveled between appointments, with a target of -10% on travel time. Across 2.3 million annual km, every percentage point represents tens of thousands of euros in savings.
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Over One Month of Real-Time Scheduling Visibility
Local planners have a consolidated rolling view of their technicians' schedules over more than one month. This visibility, impossible with the old paper diaries, enables them to anticipate overloads, prepare staffing, and improve time slot proposals to customers.
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+12% Technician Productivity: More Customer Time
The +12% productivity target translates concretely into more time spent with customers and less time on the road. For Culligan, whose after-sales service is a differentiating competitive advantage, this increased productivity directly strengthens service quality and customer retention.
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Harmonized Practices Across 34 Dealerships
Data centralization and a shared tool have enabled planning methods to be harmonized across all French dealerships. Internal benchmarking is now possible, and best practices from one dealership can be shared and rolled out across the entire network.
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Paper Diaries Replaced, Invoicing Integrated at Head Office
The elimination of paper diaries and the transition to a shared electronic format is a cultural transformation as much as an operational one. Local planners now manage schedules and invoicing from a single tool — and all data flows back in real time to head office for global performance monitoring.
Ultimately, we hope to improve the productivity of our technicians by around 12% and reduce travel time between missions by 10%. These productivity gains will allow us to spend more time with customers and thus improve our service quality.
Building on the success of the national rollout in France across 34 dealerships, Culligan is planning to deploy the Optiservice setup — including Nomadia Field Service Management — in Belgium. An international expansion that validates the robustness and scalability of the solution beyond French borders.
A Transformation Lever for Multi-Business Service Networks
+12% technician productivity, -10% travel time: each mobile resource creates more value within the same working day.
34 dealerships harmonized on the same practices, data centralized at head office: national performance management becomes a reality.
Rollout extending to Belgium: Nomadia FSM supports Culligan's growth beyond French borders.
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The solution that harmonizes technician scheduling across your entire dealership network — like Culligan.
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