Raw

# Fieldbook Rollout — Q1 Extension Decision

**To:** COO
**Re:** Extending Fieldbook to North and Islands in Q1

Fieldbook is live in Central, East, South and West after two quarters, and the board has asked for a Q1 decision on the remaining two regions. Central and East adopted fast and paid back within one quarter; South and West adopted slowly, ran up unplanned costs, and are only at break-even. Every problem behind that gap — in South and West, and in the support desk's ticket queue — traces to three fixable causes that were never addressed during the first four regions.

**Recommendation: Extend to North and Islands in Q1, conditional on fixing onboarding and the two known system gaps before go-live.** Without those fixes, North and Islands will likely repeat the West pattern and run underwater for two quarters.

## 1. The economics favor extension only if Central/East's adoption pace is reproduced

- Central and East technicians reached 80%+ Fieldbook usage within six weeks and paid back the platform's running cost by month six; South and West took up to eleven weeks and are only at break-even.
- Overtime is down 12% and fuel cost per job down 9% in the live regions — real, recurring savings once adoption is complete.
- North and Islands add £13,500/month in licences. If they adopt like South/West rather than Central/East, that spend buys no near-term return.

## 2. A single onboarding gap, not four separate problems, is what slowed South and West

- One classroom session per region, with no path for late hires or absentees, is the root cause behind: South's eleven-week ramp, West's 34 untrained technicians, 44% of all support tickets (password/login issues from technicians who never logged in during the supported window), and 380 technician-hours lost to improvised shadowing (South/West).
- Fix: run a second onboarding wave (or ongoing enrollment) in North and Islands before go-live, budgeted for winter travel, rather than repeating the one-shot classroom model.

## 3. Two vendor-ready fixes would recover value the rollout is currently leaving on the table

- **Missing asset-register feed:** technicians work blind to service history, causing warranty-duplicate part replacements in 9% of audited jobs and an empty audit trail for disputes. A nightly export has sat in the asset-register team's backlog since month two.
- **Job-code mismatch with invoicing:** forces ~300 manual re-keyed records per week, a temporary clerk (£8,400/two quarters), customer-facing invoice errors, and a 2–4% weekly reconciliation gap between Fieldbook and invoicing. The vendor has a configurable mapping table ready, needing about a day of setup — it has simply never been scheduled because no one owns the integration.
- Both are cheap to close now and will only multiply in cost across two more regions if left open.

## 4. Extension needs a mechanism to catch these issues early, which the first four regions lacked

- Every one of the above problems was visible by week four of the Central go-live, but there was no process to turn early field signals into a program-level fix — so each region repeated the same failures instead of the next one avoiding them.
- For North and Islands, assign an owner for the two integration fixes and a checkpoint at week four to catch onboarding gaps before they compound, rather than discovering them again in month three.

**Ask:** Approve Q1 extension to North and Islands on the condition that onboarding redesign and the two integration fixes are scoped and assigned before go-live.