Anyone can send an engineer to a site. The hard part is what lands on the client's desk afterwards: whether the job was done, whether it was done properly, and whether there is anything to prove it. Most of the friction in field service lives there — not in the fix.
So here is the whole thing, start to finish, with nothing dressed up.
1. It gets planned
Work arrives from a client — a locker install, a PPM round, a reactive call-out — and lands in our job management system. Roughly nine thousand work orders sit in it.
Allocation is done by the scheduler, not by hand. For every unplaced job it looks at every open engineer-day, works out how many extra miles inserting that job would actually add to that engineer's route, and places it where it costs the least — inside the zone rules, the forbidden-pair rules and a hard cap of seven jobs a day. A diary that looks full and a diary that can actually be delivered are different things.
Benchmarked against the postcode-clustering method it replaced, over the same backlog of real sites, it added 29% fewer miles.
Work is allocated by where it is, not by when it arrived. That one decision removes more wasted miles than any amount of urgency does.
2. It gets to the engineer
The engineer opens the portal on their phone and sees the day: the route, each site, the job details, the client reference, and the history of anything we have done there before. No Friday-afternoon phone call, no printed pack that is out of date by Tuesday.
Where a job has a form attached — a survey, a sign-off, a PPM checklist — it opens pre-filled from the job record. Site name, reference, postcode, scheduled date. Nobody re-types a site address into a phone in a car park, which is where a surprising amount of bad data comes from.
3. It gets done
A POWRA goes in on arrival, every site, every time, alongside the RAMS supplied for the job. Then the actual work: mechanical assembly and fixing, door and lock alignment, power and comms, commissioning, or the inspection checklist for a PPM visit.
Where a fault cannot be closed on the day, it is recorded as exactly that — with the part, the reason and what the return visit needs. A clear "not fixed, here is why" is worth considerably more than an optimistic tick.
4. It gets signed off on site
This is the step that most operations leave until the evening, and it is the step that decides whether the record is any good.
Before the engineer leaves, the sign-off form captures the lot: photographs against each question, serial numbers and readings, time on and off site, notes, and a customer signature. On some accounts that is a handful of photographs. On an InPost revisit it is twenty-seven, and engineers carry a printed visual guide showing what each one should look like — because a pack that comes back complete the first time saves everybody a second trip.
5. It gets filed, automatically
Submitting the form is the trigger. From there it happens without anyone touching it:
- The record is written to the job board, one entry per site — and one per proposed locker position, where a survey covers several.
- A branded job sheet or survey pack is rendered as a PDF, photographs and all, in the client's format.
- The PDF is filed against the job, attached to the client's record, and stored where the office and the client can both reach it.
- The work order is marked complete, with the on-site times attached to it.
- Where we are wired into a client's own system, the same data is pushed straight across — by API, webhook or scheduled file, in their format.
Same day. Usually within minutes of the engineer closing the van door. Clients who would rather look than integrate get a portal login instead: the same schedules, the same job sheets, the same photographs, on demand.
Why we bother
Because the alternative is a WhatsApp photo, a spreadsheet and somebody's memory — and that falls over the moment a client asks a reasonable question three months later.
Running it this way costs us more up front. It means building the forms, the job management system, the scheduling and the document pipeline, and keeping them working. What it buys is that every job is scheduled, dispatched and audited in one place, and that we can answer "what happened at that site?" in about ten seconds.
What this means if you are the client
Three things, mostly:
- You are not chasing paperwork. The job sheet arrives the same day, in your format, with the photographs attached.
- You can see where the work is. Schedules, progress and completed job sheets are visible — not locked in somebody's inbox.
- The record is consistent. Same checklist, same evidence, same format, branch after branch and site after site. Which is the only way estate-wide reporting means anything.
Show up. Sort it. Move on. The systems exist so that last part is actually true.