How Midco Optimized Field Service Scheduling

‍Summary

Midcontinent, known as Midco, has treated field scheduling as an opportunity rather than just a problem to solve. They needed a platform configured to their unique KPIs so that they can continuously uphold their Midco Customer Commitment and get the best technician to the right job at the right time. The results speak for themselves.

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In any field operations, but especially telco, scheduling is a constant factor to be managed. Scheduling might seem like a straight forward task. But matching the right technician to the right job at the the right time is difficult to achieve technically and can become a nightmare to complete manually. It’s no wonder that scheduling can be one of the most demanding aspects of managing a team in the field. 

But what does it mean to get the right technician to the right job at the right time? First, a technician needs the right skills to complete the job well. Second, especially for telco, an appointment window is set up based on the customer’s availability. Third, you might have the right technician with a clear schedule at the time of the appointment, but the match still doesn’t make sense if they have to drive over an hour to get to the job. With all these considerations, the solution most might think of is prior planning. But in the real world, where a truck breaks down or there’s an unexpected outage, the plan quickly goes out the window. For telcos with hundreds of technicians across a large service area and thousands of jobs, having a scheduler that quickly adapts is critical. 

This is the opportunity for improvement that Midco identified. The results of their efforts to optimize their scheduling speak for themselves. 

Midco's Customer Commitment

Midcontent or Midco is a fiber-first broadband company founded in 1931. Headquartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the company operates across 5 states, employees around 2,000 people and serves more than a million customers. The scale of their operations is intimidating alone, but Midco takes it a step further with their Midco Customer Commitment. 

Some aspects of the 12-point commitment that are directly impacted by scheduling efficiencies are: 

• Precise 15-minute appointment windows
• Same-day repairs, seven days a week
• First time right certification, with a 24-hour return commitment

The challenge was clear: how do they uphold their Customer Commitment and continue the high quality service they are known for, while rapidly expanding their service area.

Before using Zinier, Midco used three legacy systems for capacity and scheduling. Those systems were disconnected and led to fragmented data. Naturally, their operations ran into several inefficiencies. Midco needed a single source of truth for their technicians’ skills, availability, capacity and scheduling. 

When it came time to select a vendor to provide this all in one platform, Zinier FSM stood out for two reasons. First, Zinier offered a customized solution that could be configured for Midco’s exact operational needs. Second, Zinier FSM excels in auto-scheduling and capacity management features. While the platform’s features were important, a critical element to the success of the platform was how Zinier approached the relationship. Unlike legacy systems that provide the same solution to everyone and expect companies to adapt their operations to fit, the Zinier team took the time to understand Midco and what made their operations different than other broadband providers. Midco could adapt Zinier to their needs rather than having to adapt Midco processes into an inflexible software platform.

What changed operationally

Midco adopted a configurable platform with some impressive sounding features. But what were the results? 

• Midco have achieved 96% on-time arrivals year over year
• Midco customer tickets are resolved inside 24 hours on average
• Midco have recorded zero (0) P1 or P2 SLA breaches over a trailing 52-week period
• Midco have increased their auto-scheduler yield by over 10% from 2025 to 2026

In short, despite the increased volume of jobs, service quality remained exceptionally strong with the same team. And that’s the ultimate goal across the industry: more supported service area, without increased headcount or missed SLAs. 

What drove the improvement

Results like these don’t come from a single fix. They come from several contributing factors that compound over time.

Midco work closely with Zinier to improve their scheduling on an ongoing basis. The Midco team are very familiar with the Zinier platform and what it is capable of. With that understanding, they are able to configure the Zinier Scheduler to achieve their chosen KPIs. 

On Zinier’s part, several factors were used to adjust the platform’s scheduling logic: technician routing, the proximity of work orders, and the skill sets of individual technicians. The scheduling engine was configured to mirror how Midco’s unique operations actually run. 

That approach worked in other areas of Midco's setup, too. Due to Midcos unique capacity model, Zinier was built around their established structure. Thanks to the Midco's field operations team clearly identifying and understanding their capacity requirements, the platform was configured exactly as needed. 

The integration behind the scenes

None of these leaps in scheduling improvement would mean much, however, if Zinier FSM couldn’t reliably exchange information with Midco’s other systems. 

Getting the integration right required planning how the data needed to flow between the Zinier platform and Midco’s billing system. Both teams view this early planning phase as the key to making the integration successful. 

And that investment is still paying off. Today, the Zinier platform transfers millions of records to Midco's billing system so that upcoming work orders can be scheduled. The connection provides a stable, seamless dataflow between systems. That kind of dependable, high volume sync is critical for an operator running across five states and over a million customer accounts.

What's next for Midco and Zinier

So what’s next for Midco and the Zinier platform? First, Midco are planning to build out a new skills management workflow. Combined with a technician skills dashboard, the skills management platform will support ongoing review of technician capabilities. Their goal is to keep improving their first-time right rates as part of their Customer Commitment. Insight on performance is essential as Midco’s service area expands. Additionally, Midco plans on building on the existing Q-code framework to develop what they describe as a smart Q-code reallocation capability. 

The bigger picture

At the end of the day, what tells an organization that a software has been successfully implemented? At Midco, the strongest indicator was when the platform stopped being something the team had to actively manage and started being something they simply rely on. At the beginning, naturally, the Midco team had to verify the data. But as with most systems, when Zinier FSM began consistently delivering accurate results over time, the need for verification dropped. At that point, the platform became invisible in the best sense, and midco team members could focus entirely on serving customers.

The Midco story is a useful approach to scheduling challenges across telco and broadband. Operators across this industry are faced with the same question: How to match the right technician to the right job at the right time while growing coverage areas and keeping the headcount the same. However, not all operators have systems that crumble under that task. 

If you’d like to learn more about Zinier FSM and how it can better support your operations - try our scheduling capabilities with your data.

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