Travel 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.
A single-building maintenance team travels between floors. A team covering twelve buildings across a region travels for a substantial part of every day, and unless travel is recorded separately it disappears into job durations and makes every task look slower than it is. For a product-side comparison related to coordinating a workforce across several locations, see remote workforce management software before deciding which data the operation actually needs.
The consequence is a capacity calculation that is wrong and a set of duration estimates that cannot be compared between sites.
Record it as its own category
Travel folded into job time corrupts two things at once: the job estimate, which now includes an amount of travel that varies by location, and the travel figure itself, which is never seen. For a wider operational and compliance reference, consult U.S. Department of Labor hours-worked guidance.
Recording travel separately costs a field and gives you the total, which is usually larger than anyone assumed, and the per-site breakdown, which tells you where the portfolio is expensive to serve.
If travel is inside the job time, an identical task will appear to take twice as long at the remote site. Duration data becomes incomparable, and the remote site's technician looks slow.
The scheduling decisions that move it
- Geographic batching — grouping jobs by site so a visit does several things rather than one. The single largest lever available.
- A day-per-site pattern rather than reacting to whichever job is highest priority, accepting that some work waits a few days to be done efficiently.
- Sequencing the day to avoid crossing the same ground twice, which is a small optimisation done badly by default.
- Deciding deliberately which sites are worth a local stock holding and which are not.
Batching conflicts with strict priority order, and the conflict has to be resolved explicitly rather than left to whoever is dispatching. The workable rule is that high-priority work travels immediately and everything else waits for the scheduled visit.
Van stock is a travel decision
The most expensive travel is the second trip: the return journey for a part that was not carried. On a dispersed portfolio a single return visit can cost more time than the task.
Van stock is therefore not primarily an inventory question but a travel-reduction one. The items worth carrying are those with high frequency of use and low value, and the analysis needs the job history to identify them. Departments that set van stock by intuition typically carry the wrong things and still make return trips.
Be clear about what is paid
Whether travel between home and the first site is working time, and whether travel between sites is paid, are contractual and legal questions that differ by jurisdiction and by contract, and they are a common source of disputes.
The rules around mobile workers with no fixed workplace are particularly unsettled between jurisdictions. Establish the position that applies to you, write it into the contract, and be consistent — this is not an area to leave to custom and practice, because custom and practice tends to become the contract.
Consider whether the coverage model is right
Where travel consumes a very large share of hours, the answer may not be better scheduling but a different model: a resident technician at the largest site, a local contractor for the most remote ones, or a redrawn territory.
That analysis requires the travel figure. Without it, the conversation is about how hard the team is working, and the actual constraint — that a third of the week is spent in a van — never gets stated.