AI Scheduler Helps Certification Body Reduce Month-Long Scheduling Time to Just 12 Minutes

THE COMPANY

Background

The company is a leading certification and standardization organization with a network of offices spread across 12 countries and activity in 90 countries. As the leading certification entity in Spain for both quality management systems and environmental management systems, they manage approximately 4,000 certificates. 

Their experts conduct over 3 million hours of auditing annually, providing inspections, certifications, validations, and verifications across numerous sectors including public administration, aerospace, food, automotive, construction, chemicals/pharmacy, health services, transport/logistics, and tourism.

THE CHALLENGE

Scheduling Complexity Overwhelming Manual Systems

The organization was facing challenges with their scheduling processes that were limiting their operational efficiency and growth potential.

Their internal scheduling system wasn't widely adopted by staff due to integration challenges, which led to scheduling responsibilities being distributed across individuals rather than managed centrally. This created a situation where no single person had complete visibility of all scheduled activities across the organization.

Without centralized oversight, their planning team spent considerable time manually tracking scheduling status for their 800 auditors to ensure timely completion of all audits – important for both client satisfaction and compliance requirements.

These scheduling challenges created several operational hurdles:

1. Each audit required specific technical expertise, with numerous skill codes and complex rotation rules
2. Without system-wide optimization, geographical assignments often resulted in unnecessary travel
3. Planners devoted significant time to administrative management rather than strategic initiatives
4. The distributed approach made it difficult to maintain complete visibility of scheduling status

THE SOLUTION

AI-Powered Automated Scheduling

After evaluating various alternatives, the company turned to Checkfirst for their scheduling software, ScheduleAI, to transform their scheduling process:

1. AI-Driven Audit Allocation: ScheduleAI was deployed to automate the matching of auditors to 2,124 audits based on complex criteria, including technical qualifications, rotation rules, and geographic proximity.
2. Intelligent Geographic Optimization: The AI scheduling tool analyzed auditor locations and audit sites to minimize travel time and maximize productivity.
3. Centralized Scheduling Visibility: The system provided a comprehensive view of all scheduled and pending audits, enabling better planning and compliance management.

MEASURABLE RESULTS

From Manual to Automated Workflows

Adopting Checkfirst's AI scheduler resulted in prompt and impressive performance gains:

1. Remarkable Time Savings: What previously took an entire month was completed in just 12 minutes (scheduling 49,000 hours of audits).
2. Perfect Allocation Rate: The AI schedule generator successfully allocated 100% of certification audits to qualified auditors without manual intervention.
3. Proximity Optimization: 30% of audits were scheduled near locations where auditors already had assignments.
4. Lower Travel Requirements: The solution reduced travel by 21%, eliminating 147,523 kilometers of unnecessary movement.

I'm speechless! It usually takes us a month to do what you did in just 12 minutes. I'm eager to thoroughly expand it to all our operations as soon as possible. The benefits are huge! This genuinely makes life easier for everyone on our team. Well done to the team involved; this is way above my expectations. So, thank you very much.

Managing Director | Certification Body

INTANGIBLE BENEFITS

Quality Transformations

The shift to AI scheduling went deeper than numbers alone, reshaping the company's fundamental operational structure.

1. Improved Work-Life Balance: Auditors reported better satisfaction with more logical travel schedules and fewer long-distance trips.
2. Enhanced Strategic Focus: The scheduling team shifted from tedious manual work to focusing on client relationships and strategic planning.
3. Greater Client Responsiveness: Clients received faster responses to certification requests, as the automated scheduling system could quickly accommodate changes.

LOOKING FORWARD

Building for Sustainable Growth

With Checkfirst's AI scheduler working successfully, the company has set up a scalable foundation for further growth of their certification services. They're now well-positioned to:

1. Use data collected through the scheduling software to gain new insights into certification patterns
2. Create opportunities for specialized service offerings based on scheduling intelligence provided by the schedule maker AI