From a pinned wall map to field-service operations

Mandate

Integrate acquisitions and raise service reliability under new sponsor ownership without wearing out the technician workforce.

Outcomes

• Integrated Sallowmont Technical Services after its April 2022 acquisition, retaining its Spokane desk as a western hub
• Introduced mass-incident clustering; the first 2025 outage was declared within 22 minutes
• Reduced technician attrition from 27 to 19 per cent after reworking scheduled hours
• Raised the first-visit fix rate from 78 to 86 per cent between 2021 and 2025

Decisions in context

I took this role two months after Amberlode acquired its majority holding. The sponsor wanted acquisitions and margin improvement; the founders wanted the company's standing with long-standing clients protected. Much of my work has been to show both groups what an operating choice will cost before it is made. I lead field operations, dispatch, remote resolution, depot repair, installation programmes and the Querétaro centre through seven direct reports. Security, commercial terms, finance and people policy sit with their own executives, and I work with each of them on contracts and budgets. The three cases on this site come from this period: a credit we chose to pay, a rollout we chose to shrink and an acquired desk we chose to keep. I present operating results to the board each quarter but am not a director of the company.

Reason for the move

Still in post; I would add one external directorship with Brisendale's agreement rather than leave.

Mandate

Shorten time to repair and reduce unnecessary site visits as the client base grew.

Outcomes

• Opened the Querétaro remote-resolution centre with 120 analysts in 2019, growing to 210 by early 2021
• Cut unnecessary site visits by 17 per cent through remote diagnosis before dispatch
• Moved depot repair to Plainfield, Indiana, shortening the average repair cycle from nine to six days

Decisions in context

I joined to run the parts of the company that decide whether a technician should go at all. Too many visits ended with a technician discovering that the fault could have been cleared remotely, or that the right part was in another state. We built remote diagnosis into every call before dispatch and gave depot repair its own building in Plainfield. The larger decision was Querétaro. I spent most of 2018 working out which tasks could follow a written runbook and which needed someone able to reach a field supervisor at once. We opened with 120 analysts handling routine daytime faults and kept judgement calls in Indianapolis. Two tasks moved back within a year when resolution rates fell. Reporting those reversals honestly to the founders mattered more to me than defending the original plan I had argued for.

Reason for the move

Appointed chief operating officer when my predecessor retired after the sponsor's investment.

Mandate

Reduce the time from contract signature to go-live and stabilise a support desk that customers were openly criticising.

Outcomes

• Reduced average implementation time from fourteen to seven weeks
• Made the implementation backlog a weekly executive-team report
• Raised first-contact resolution on the support desk from 54 to 71 per cent

Decisions in context

This was my first role at a software company, and I arrived knowing more about installing terminals than about configuring menus and loyalty rules. The implementation team had more signed contracts than it could start, and new customers waited up to fourteen weeks. Sales was paid on signature, so the queue grew fastest when the company was doing well. I made the backlog visible to the executive team every week and agreed with sales that no contract would promise a go-live date until a consultant had been assigned. We also split the support desk by restaurant type so analysts learnt one kind of customer well. The work taught me how an implementation backlog quietly turns into a support problem, and how much of field service begins with software decisions made far from the store.

Reason for the move

Joined Brisendale to return to field operations at a larger scale.

Mandate

Shorten repair cycles and reduce the spares that clients needed to hold.

Outcomes

• Reorganised benches around fault families; the average repair cycle fell from eleven to seven days
• Reduced the spares inventory by US$2.4 million through repair-cycle forecasting
• Introduced a returned-within-ninety-days measure for every repaired device

Decisions in context

Mardonley repaired devices that retailers shipped in by the pallet, and its clients bought spares to cover the weeks those devices spent with us. Every day of repair cycle therefore cost the client money it never saw on our invoice. I reorganised the benches around fault families, so that a technician who repaired printer heads did so all day rather than switching between customers' mixed boxes. Two account managers objected because they had promised named technicians to clients, and I spent several months rebuilding those relationships. I also introduced a measure of devices returned within ninety days, which showed that our fastest benches were not always our best. By 2010 I understood depot economics well, but I wanted to see how the software running on these devices was chosen, implemented and supported by the people who sold it.

Reason for the move

Moved to a software company to learn implementation and support from the vendor's side.

Mandate

Deliver store conversions over nights and weekends without disrupting trading.

Outcomes

• Introduced warehouse rehearsals of each new store layout before conversion
• Completed a forty-store grocery conversion over three weekends with no store opening late
• Roughly halved post-conversion support calls across 2002 and 2003

Decisions in context

Pellwarren converted grocery and pharmacy stores from old registers to networked point-of-sale systems, almost always overnight or at weekends. I began as a project manager responsible for a handful of stores and became manager of the installation group in 2001. The conversions that went wrong were rarely technical failures. They were crews meeting an unfamiliar counter layout at two in the morning with no one to ask. I started rehearsing each new layout in our warehouse, with the actual fixtures, before the first live conversion. It lengthened every project by about a week, and the sales team found that hard to explain to clients. It also meant store managers could open their lanes on Monday. I learnt here that a well-prepared crew does more for a client than a merely fast one.

Reason for the move

Recruited to run depot operations for a repair company with clients across the country.

Mandate

Assign service calls so that urgent customers were reached first and engineers' days remained workable.

Outcomes

• Began recording travel and waiting time separately from repair time
• Wrote the dispatch room's first written priority rules
• Reduced repeat calls on the same machine within a week by about a fifth

Decisions in context

I came to Brannockfield straight from my engineering degree and learnt dispatch from a supervisor who had done it for twenty years without writing anything down. Calls came by telephone, engineers rang in between jobs and the day lived on a wall map. When I became supervisor in 1996, I wrote the room's first priority rules so that a new coordinator did not have to guess which customer to disappoint. I also began recording travel and waiting time separately, after our most capable engineer resigned following a winter of long weeks the monthly report had praised. I had no say over pay or staffing levels. What I could do was make the real working day visible to the service manager, who did adjust territories, and that habit of counting the whole day has followed me into every role since.

Reason for the move

Moved into retail-technology installation, where the work was growing faster.