[Interview] Maintenance Intervention Planning: A Strategic Challenge for ENGIE Solutions
- 08/07/2026
- 11:53
Tiempo de lectura : 2 min
Responsable de marketing de contenidos
Since January 1, 2020, ENGIE Solutions has brought together all of the ENGIE Group’s B2B energy activities under a single brand. Previously organized by business line, these activities are now structured into three customer-oriented business units: Cities & Communities, Industry, and Commercial & Local Services.
Patrick Hourqueig, Tools & Methods Manager for the Commercial & Local Services business unit, explains the challenges and strategic importance of planning interventions for the 7,000 technicians and field agents who maintain ENGIE Solutions’ customer installations across France.
Sommaire
Has the creation of ENGIE Solutions changed the maintenance organization and your role within it?
«Fundamentally, no. We are in the middle of a transformation designed to strengthen our customer focus by providing a single commercial point of contact. As far as maintenance is concerned, it remains organized on a territorial basis, with each installation assigned to a local agency. Neither the scope nor the activities of the agencies have changed, which is essential to ensure service continuity and meet our contractual commitments.
However, we still need to complete the convergence of our tools and methods. That has been my responsibility for the past 20 years, overseeing the implementation and management of our planning system, and for the last ten years, more specifically, the solutions used by our scheduling teams. In every agency, these teams organize technicians’ field activities and ensure that everything is completed on time.»
Your installations are highly diverse. How does this diversity create planning challenges for on-site interventions?
«Residential and office building boiler rooms, industrial cooling towers, combined heat and power systems, district heating and cooling networks… our installations are indeed very diverse, and our mission is to ensure they operate under normal conditions.
Each installation has its own specific characteristics, but they are all subject to a wide range of environmental, operational, and safety regulations. This means that every installation requires a number of mandatory inspections with frequencies that vary from one site to another and require different technical skills.
In addition to these regulatory inspections, technical maintenance operations must be scheduled throughout the year, with intervals ranging from weekly to annual depending on the type of installation and contract. Naturally, maintenance requirements are far more demanding for industrial sites operating 24/7 than for residential boilers. Even then, residential boilers have their own constraints—you obviously don’t schedule an apartment building’s annual boiler service in the middle of January.
These interventions are therefore planned annually for every installation. The operational challenge is to complete all scheduled work while simultaneously handling inherently unpredictable events—breakdowns and malfunctions—that require corrective maintenance with varying degrees of urgency.»
How are your field resources organized?
«Each installation is managed by an agency. Each agency has its own technicians and assigns them responsibility for maintaining a number of installations.
Most agency technicians are mobile workers. They have their own vehicles, tools, spare parts, and are autonomous in performing technical work. However, their activities are planned centrally by the agency on a weekly basis.
Every Friday, technicians receive their schedule for the following week. This schedule is prepared by the agency’s scheduling team. Centralizing planning allows us to consider the entire workload, distribute it among available technicians, and optimize individual schedules according to each person’s skills and specializations, as well as customer time constraints, estimated intervention durations, and, of course, legal working hours.»
What tools are used to plan technicians' activities?
«For around ten years, all planning has been carried out using Nomadia Field Service.
Within the scheduling departments, the solution is used by both schedulers and dispatchers. Schedulers organize weekly, monthly, quarterly, and semi-annual preventive maintenance specified in customer contracts. They establish an annual maintenance plan and then balance technicians’ workloads throughout the year. They also adjust this plan according to weekly operational constraints.
Dispatchers, meanwhile, handle corrective interventions. During business hours, they receive and assess customer requests. If the intervention is not urgent, it is inserted into the assigned technician’s planned schedule and, whenever possible, combined with the next planned visit. In urgent cases, the intervention is automatically assigned to the technician dedicated to corrective work.
Performance Energy Managers also have access to Nomadia Field Service. When they detect an issue on one of the installations they monitor, they can either verify that a scheduled intervention is approaching or trigger an immediate intervention before the customer even notices any operational deviation.»
How is a technician informed that an unplanned intervention has been assigned?
«All of our mobile technicians are equipped with tablets running an internally developed application connected to Nomadia Field Service.
Through this application, technicians receive both their weekly schedule and their daily agenda, including corrective interventions. The mobile application enables them to manage all activity tracking, record intervention start and finish times, and generate all regulatory documents required by customers after each intervention.
Paper intervention forms and quotation pads have disappeared—we’re now almost entirely paperless.
The mobility solution is also connected to a mobile phone, allowing the after-hours call operator, team manager, or scheduling department to contact technicians whenever necessary.»
Over the past 10 years, what has changed the most in the organization of scheduled, unscheduled, and emergency interventions?
«The biggest change has been moving to daily planning within a weekly schedule.
Previously, technicians received an entire month’s schedule and worked almost completely independently. We knew interventions had been completed, but not exactly what had actually been done. As a result, producing and delivering activity reports, regulatory inspection reports, and customer documentation on time was difficult.
Today’s tools and organization allow us to monitor activities day by day and know almost in real time whether an intervention is underway, completed, or delayed. This allows us to keep customers informed and adjust schedules from week to week.
Planned interventions that are not completed are placed on hold. At the end of each week, planners review them with team leaders, reschedule these interventions, and reorganize the following week’s workload.
Behind the scenes, our biggest improvement has been the ability to incorporate far more criteria—including information coming directly from technicians in the field—to optimize planning, balance workloads, and manage unexpected events.
Using installation geolocation and all available operational parameters, Nomadia Field Service automatically organizes technicians’ activities and makes adjustments easier by allowing us to visualize operations by team, technician, agency, or intervention type over any period.
All of this contributes to better technical operation of installations, more rigorous contract management, and more efficient use of human resources, which are essential for both business profitability and customer satisfaction.»
What would enable you to become even more efficient?
«Within Nomadia Field Service, several new features are particularly interesting to us and are currently being tested—or will be soon.
I’m thinking, for example, about incorporating real-time traffic information. In dense urban environments, this would allow us to determine whether a technician can reach an emergency intervention quickly and accurately inform the customer of the expected arrival time.
Vehicle geolocation is also valuable because it helps identify the closest technician with the appropriate technical expertise.
In addition, we plan to use Nomadia’s optimization tools to improve technicians’ routes, reducing both travel distances and our CO₂ emissions.
On the installation side, remote monitoring and preventive maintenance capabilities continue to evolve. We now have acoustic monitoring systems capable of detecting wear on belts or bearings. These sound-based anomaly detection systems can be automated using machine learning.
The challenge is teaching the system what normal operation sounds like. Once that baseline is established, deviations can automatically trigger maintenance interventions.
Ultimately, audio- or video-monitored installations will automatically generate preventive or corrective work orders, which will then be integrated directly into the planning system. The same principle will apply to chatbots that analyze requests from certain categories of customers.»
What advice would you give someone implementing planning in a similar business?
«When manufacturers deliver an installation, they provide technical guidelines and predefined maintenance schedules. That’s where you should start. Take those maintenance schedules and place them into an annual planning calendar.
Next, make sure mandatory interventions are scheduled during the appropriate periods of the year. As I mentioned, you don’t perform annual maintenance on a heating system in the middle of winter. School buildings can only have installations shut down during holiday periods, and so on.
Once everything has been mapped out over the year for every installation, compare it with technician availability while considering skills, installation portfolios, and seasonal workload peaks and valleys.
This balancing process is complex because it involves many human factors—not only summer vacations but also local and individual circumstances.
For example, in some regions, technicians who hunt take leave in September. It may sound anecdotal, but it isn’t. On the Basque coast, if you want to preserve good labor relations and maintain service quality, your planning needs to take squid fishing season into account. That’s simply part of life.
Using this approach, it’s possible to plan 70% to 80% of technicians’ annual workload, giving them visibility while still preserving enough flexibility to deal with unforeseen events and unscheduled interventions.»
ENGIE Solutions combines the former ENGIE Axima (HVAC engineering), ENGIE Cofely (energy and environmental efficiency services), ENGIE Ineo (smart building and smart city solutions), and ENGIE Réseaux (district heating networks for local authorities).