The job takes an hour. The travel takes ninety minutes.

Travel is the job

For a technician doing four or five visits a day across a city, time on the road frequently exceeds time on the tools. A schedule counting only job duration is describing a minority of the day.

This is why field businesses so often find that adding a technician does not add proportionate capacity. The new person absorbs travel at the same rate as everyone else, and the fifth job of the day was never really available.

Cluster by area, not by urgency

The instinct is to schedule in the order requests arrived. The result is a route that crosses the city twice.

Clustering a day's work geographically, with one slot held back for genuine emergencies, typically fits more jobs into the same day than any amount of pressure on technicians to work faster.

The metric worth managing

First-time fix rate, meaning the proportion of jobs completed without a return visit, is the number that governs field service economics. A return visit costs the travel twice and earns once.

Most return visits trace to a part not carried or information not gathered when the job was booked. Both are fixable at the booking stage, which is where the effort should go rather than into pushing technicians.

Capture at the door, not at the depot

Job notes, parts used and customer signature recorded at the customer's premises are accurate. The same recorded at the depot at six o'clock are approximate, and the parts are systematically under-recorded because small items are forgotten.