ENGIE Solutions uses Nomadia Field Service to optimize the routes of its 3,400 technicians and thus increases its number of daily jobs.
ENGIE Solutions, a specialist in energy and environmental efficiency services, uses Nomadia Field Service to manage the routes of 3,400 technicians, thereby increasing the number of daily interventions.
Their Challenges and the Solution Provided by Nomadia
Since January 1, 2020, ENGIE Solutions has brought together all of ENGIE Group’s B2B energy activities under a single banner. Previously organized by business line, these activities are now structured into three client-focused business units: Cities & Communities, Industries, and Tertiary & Local Services.
Reporting to the latter, Patrick Hourqueig, Head of Tools & Methods, explains the challenges and stakes of planning interventions for the 7,000 technicians and agents who maintain ENGIE Solutions’ client installations across the country.
Has the creation of ENGIE Solutions changed the maintenance organization and your role within it?
Fundamentally, no. We are in a period of change aimed at strengthening our client focus, with the goal of having a single point of contact at the commercial level. Maintenance, however, remains organized territorially, with each installation assigned to a local agency. Neither the scope nor the activities of the agencies have changed, which is essential for ensuring continuity of service and fulfilling our contractual commitments.
My role is to complete the convergence of tools and methods. For the past 20 years, I have been responsible for implementing and managing the planning system, and for the last ten years, specifically for the solutions used by scheduling teams who organize technician activities in the field and ensure everything is completed on time.
Your installations are very diverse. How does this diversity create a challenge for on-site intervention planning?
Boiler rooms for residential or office buildings, industrial cooling towers, energy cogeneration systems, heating and cooling networks… our installations are indeed very diverse, and our mission is to ensure their proper functioning. Each installation has its specifics, but all are subject to a set of rules – environmental, operational, and safety-related. Each installation therefore requires a number of regulatory visits, with frequency varying by site and requiring different skill sets.
In addition to these regulatory tasks, technical maintenance interventions must be scheduled throughout the year, with intervals ranging from weekly to annual, depending on the type of installation and contract. Naturally, monitoring and maintenance requirements are much more demanding for industrial sites operating 24/7 than for residential boilers, which still have constraints – for example, we don’t schedule an annual boiler service in the middle of January!
These interventions are planned annually for each installation. The operational challenge for our teams is to carry out all interventions while managing inherently unscheduled events – breakdowns and malfunctions – requiring corrective action from our technicians with varying urgency.
How are your field resources organized?
Each installation is linked to an agency. Each agency has its technicians, assigning them a number of installations to maintain. Most agency-assigned technicians are mobile, equipped with vehicles, tools, spare parts, etc., and work autonomously. However, their activities are planned at the agency level on a weekly basis.
Every Friday, technicians receive their schedule for the following week. This schedule is prepared by the agency’s scheduling team, allowing them to consider the entire workload, distribute it among available technicians, and optimize individual schedules based on skills, specializations, client time constraints, estimated duration of interventions, and legal working hours.
What tools are used to plan technicians’ activities?
For the past ten years, all planning has been carried out using Nomadia Field Service. Within the scheduling teams, Nomadia Field Service is used by schedulers and dispatchers. Schedulers organize weekly, monthly, quarterly, and semi-annual maintenance tasks as defined in contracts. They create annual plans and, based on these, smooth the workload for technicians. They also adjust schedules in response to unexpected events.
Dispatchers handle corrective interventions. During business hours, they receive and analyze client requests. Non-urgent interventions are inserted into the scheduled activities of the technician responsible for the installation and, if possible, combined with the nearest planned intervention. In urgent cases, the intervention is automatically assigned to the technician responsible for corrective operations.
Performance Energy Managers within the teams also have access to Nomadia Field Service and can, if they detect a problem on an installation they monitor, check whether a planned intervention is nearby or trigger an immediate intervention before the client even notices a deviation in the installation’s operation.
How is a technician notified of an unplanned intervention?
All mobile technicians are equipped with a tablet running an internally developed app interfaced with Nomadia Field Service. Through this app, technicians receive their weekly schedule and, in agenda format, their daily tasks and corrective interventions. This mobile tool allows them to track operations, log start and end times, and generate all regulatory documents for clients following interventions.
Paper forms and invoices have almost disappeared. The mobile tool is also linked to a phone, allowing the dispatcher, team leader, or scheduling team to contact the technician if needed.
What has changed most in the organization of interventions over the past 10 years?
The major change is the shift to daily scheduling of technicians’ weekly activities. Previously, technicians had a monthly schedule and were completely autonomous. We knew interventions were completed but not precisely what had been done. This made timely reporting of activity, regulatory checks, and client feedback difficult.
The tools and organization now allow us to monitor daily activity in near real-time, informing clients and adjusting schedules week by week. Planned but uncompleted interventions are put on hold and re-planned at the end of the week in consultation with team leaders.
In the background, we can now consider more criteria, including field feedback from technicians, to optimize planning, smooth workloads, and manage uncertainties. Using installation geolocation and input parameters, Nomadia Field Service automatically organizes technician activities and facilitates adjustments, allowing visualization by team, technician, agency, or intervention type.
This contributes to proper operation of installations, rigorous contract and resource management, essential for profitability and client satisfaction.
What could make you even more efficient?
Certain features in Nomadia Field Service are of particular interest and are being tested or will be soon. Real-time traffic integration, for example, would allow us to determine the fastest technician for urgent interventions in dense urban areas and provide clients with estimated arrival times. Vehicle geolocation could identify the closest qualified technician. We also plan to use Nomadia tools to optimize technician routes, reducing kilometers traveled and better controlling CO₂ emissions.
For installations, remote monitoring and preventive measures are evolving. We now have audio surveillance solutions that detect wear on belts or bearings, which can be automated using machine learning.
The system must learn the normal operation to identify deviations and trigger interventions. In the future, audio or video-monitored installations will automatically generate preventive or corrective requests that integrate directly into scheduling. Chatbots will similarly analyze client requests in certain categories.
What advice would you give to someone setting up planning in a field similar to yours?
When manufacturers deliver an installation, they provide technical directives and predefined maintenance routines. Start with these routines and schedule them annually. Ensure mandatory interventions occur at the right time – for example, don’t schedule annual boiler maintenance in the middle of winter. For schools, maintenance can only occur during vacation periods.
Map out all these elements for the year, installation by installation, then align with technician availability, considering skills, installation portfolios, and seasonal peaks and troughs. This smoothing process is complex due to numerous human factors: summer vacations, local specifics, or individual preferences. For instance, in some regions, technicians take holidays in September. This may seem minor but is critical for maintaining social climate and service quality.
By doing so, 70–80% of annual technician activity can be planned, giving visibility while leaving flexibility for unplanned interventions.
ENGIE Axima (HVAC), ENGIE Cofely (energy and environmental efficiency services), ENGIE Ineo (smart building and city integrator), ENGIE Réseaux (district heating networks for communities)
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