Raw

Subject: Recommendation: Extend Fieldbook to North and Islands in Q1

Fieldbook has delivered strong operational gains and cost reductions across the four live regions, confirming its value to Kestrel's maintenance model. However, rollout defects in training delivery and system integrations are creating avoidable costs, eroding margins in slower regions, and threatening the profitability of any further expansion. Extending to North and Islands in Q1 is recommended, provided we restructure the onboarding program and implement the asset-register and invoicing integrations before go-live.

**Fieldbook generates measurable efficiency and cost savings in live regions.**
*   Technician productivity increased from 4.6 to 5.3 jobs per day, with average travel time between jobs falling 18%.
*   Emergency same-day insertions are now automatic, reducing median assignment time to 4 minutes.
*   Overtime spending dropped 12% quarter-over-quarter, and fuel cost per job decreased 9%, driven by optimized routing.
*   Dispatchers achieved full adoption by week one following the removal of the legacy spreadsheet.
*   Financial return on investment was realized within the second quarter in Central and East.

**Training bottlenecks and integration gaps are driving rework costs and adoption delays.**
*   Classroom training is scheduled only once per region, causing adoption lags in South and West; improvised shadowing arrangements consumed an estimated 380 technician-hours of lost route time.
*   Missing equipment service history from the legacy asset register forces technicians to call the back office or ask customers, resulting in 9% of audited jobs replacing parts already covered by warranty.
*   Mismatched job-completion codes between Fieldbook and the invoicing system require the billing team to manually re-key approximately 300 records weekly, introducing transcription errors and a 2–4% monthly reconciliation variance.
*   A search limitation restricted to exact postcodes generates duplicate customer records, requiring support to merge roughly 70 records per week and fragmenting job histories.
*   Program governance failed to escalate negative patterns observed in week four of the Central rollout, allowing identical issues to recur in subsequent regions.

**Remediation steps are defined, vendor-supported, and feasible within the Q1 timeline.**
*   The vendor offers a configurable mapping table to resolve code mismatches, with setup estimated at one day.
*   Supported connectors exist for both the asset register database and the invoicing import format; IT assessment confirms these integrations are straightforward to implement.
*   Vendor responsiveness remains within contract terms, and all known technical solutions are awaiting Kestrel authorization rather than vendor development.
*   Restructuring onboarding to allow continuous or multiple training sessions will eliminate the shadowing costs and accelerate adoption curves to match Central and East performance.

Next step: Approve Q1 extension contingent on program office scoping the asset-register and invoicing integrations and redesigning the training schedule for North and Islands by end of month.

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Restructured into a decision memo with an answer-first top, three ranked groups (value, risk, feasibility), and consolidated cross-section duplicates into MECE branches.