Where technician hours actually go
A technician paid for eight hours delivers rather fewer on the tools. The gap is measurable, largely structural, and almost never measured.
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Technician time
Where the hours go: wrench time, travel, waiting for parts, and the honest measurement of all three.
Home/Technician time
A technician paid for eight hours does not deliver eight hours of maintenance. Travel between sites, collecting parts, waiting for access, briefings and paperwork consume a substantial share, and in most organisations nobody has measured how much. For a separate product-side perspective on monitoring distributed employees, this page provides additional detail.
That unmeasured share is the single largest source of error in maintenance planning. This section deals with measuring it, and with doing so without turning the exercise into surveillance. For a wider operational and compliance reference, consult U.S. Department of Labor hours-worked guidance.
Measuring wrench time without a stopwatch
Formal work sampling is disproportionate for most departments. Lighter methods give a good enough figure and do far less damage to trust.
Read the guideTravel time, the largest hidden cost in dispersed maintenance
On a multi-site portfolio, travel can consume more of the week than the work does, and it is usually invisible in the job records.
Read the guideWaiting: the category nobody plans for
Waiting for a part, a key, an isolation or a room is the least visible category of lost time and often the easiest to reduce.
Read the guideTimesheets for people who are never at a desk
Time recorded at the end of the week from memory is fiction with a signature on it. The fix is capture at the point of work.
Read the guideTracking time without building a surveillance system
Mobile workforce products offer continuous location and activity monitoring. Very few maintenance questions require any of it.
Read the guideScheduling a maintenance team of five
Below a certain size, scheduling stops being an optimisation problem and becomes a search for any arrangement that satisfies the constraints.
Read the guideOn-call and callout, paid and rostered properly
Out-of-hours cover in a small department usually falls on whoever is least able to say no, and is frequently paid on a basis nobody wrote down.
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