7:40 am. The dispatcher is on the phone with a technician sitting in a parking lot, waiting to find out whether the parts for his first job arrived. She doesn’t know. The warehouse doesn’t open for twenty minutes. Meanwhile three other techs are calling in with the same question.
That was a Tuesday at a 25-technician equipment service company running about 6,000 calls a year. By the end of the week we worked out that each tech was losing roughly 40 minutes a day to information that was late, wrong, or missing.
The schedule wasn’t the problem. The information was.
When we asked the service manager what he needed, he said “better routing software.” When we asked the technicians what they needed, they said something quite different.
- Which parts are on the truck right now, not which parts were loaded on Monday.
- Whether the customer’s equipment history shows this as a repeat failure.
- Whether the site needs a lift, a permit, or a two-person crew.
- Who to call if the gate is locked before 8 am.
Not one of those is a routing question. They’re all “what do I need to know before I walk in the door” questions, and every missing answer turns into a phone call, a trip back to the shop, or a second visit.
Forty minutes a day, in plain math
Twenty-five technicians, forty minutes each, 240 working days. That’s 4,000 hours of lost billable capacity a year, or roughly the output of two full-time technicians.
- Put the job checklist on the tech’s phone the night before — parts, site requirements, equipment history, contact name, all in one place.
- Require truck inventory to be scanned when it changes, not at the end of the day. The moment a part comes off the shelf, it’s recorded.
- Flag repeat failures automatically. If the same serial number has been serviced three times in six months, the tech sees that before leaving, not after arriving.
Two of those three changes are process, not software. That’s typical. When ERP Consulting teams get called into a service business, the first useful question is usually “what doesn’t the tech know at 7 am?”
What customers noticed
First-time fix rate went from 68% to 81% over two quarters. Second trips dropped by nearly half, and that’s where the real money was hiding — an average second trip cost $190 in truck time and lost billing.
The service manager now reviews two numbers every Monday: first-time fix rate and repeat visits. It’s a habit that came out of a short ERP Consulting engagement and outlasted it by years.
The dispatcher got her mornings back too. Instead of fielding fifteen “do I have the part” calls, she spends the first hour on tomorrow’s schedule. That one shift is worth more than most software decisions.
Walk into your service operation tomorrow at 7:30 am and count how many calls come in before the first truck rolls. That number is your baseline, and it’s usually the fastest place to start.