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The encyclopedia · Strategy & Leadership · Operational decision · 2011

ANWB cut roadside dispatchers from 50+ to 14 by optimizing one national plan

ANWB redesigned roadside dispatch from regional desks to one national optimizer, using 14 planners instead of 50+ and lifting service efficiency 14%.

ANWB (Royal Dutch Touring Club)

the move

The Dutch motoring association ANWB responds to about 1.3 million roadside service requests a year for its nearly four million members. Historically, more than 50 planners working in regional offices assigned requests to service personnel in real time, often in hectic conditions, with little visibility of how their decisions affected members.

A business-process reengineering project rebuilt planning on state-of-the-art IT and operations research. Dispatching was centralized at a national level, where an optimizer assigns jobs and routes across regions instead of each regional desk improvising.

As few as 14 planners can now run the process, service operations efficiency improved 14%, and ANWB kept its high satisfaction ratings and market share even as new competitors entered roadside assistance.

why it works

  • Pooling demand nationally smooths load, so fewer planners cover the same requests.
  • An optimizer assigns the nearest capable resource and routes the work, removing the mental math of 50 independent desks.
  • The redesign linked planning decisions to member-visible performance, so trade-offs were made consciously.
the payoffPlan nationally with OR, not locally by habitclever

what transfers

When a service is staffed by many small desks, the bottleneck is coordination, not headcount: pooling demand into one optimized queue shrinks the team and improves the service at the same time.

what came after

ANWB retained high customer satisfaction and market share as competitors entered the Dutch roadside market, and it adapted its services to market prices. The paper reports the process running with 14 planners at a national level.

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