Raw

# Decision: extend Fieldbook to North and Islands in Q1 only after fixing the repeatable rollout blockers

Fieldbook has improved scheduling, productivity, travel time, overtime and fuel costs in the four live regions. But the rollout will be uneconomic if North and Islands repeat South and West’s slow adoption pattern. Approve a gated Q1 extension: restructure onboarding and assign integration ownership before launch.

## The extension can reproduce the fast-adoption economics

Central and East reached full adoption within six weeks and paid back running costs in the second quarter. Across all four live regions, 412 of 486 technicians have activated accounts and 83% of work orders are created and closed in Fieldbook.

South needed eleven weeks to exceed 80% of orders in the system, while West remains at 71% after nine weeks. Both regions had only one two-day classroom course; later hires and absentees learned from colleagues. In West, 34 of 118 technicians attended no session, and improvised shadowing consumed an estimated 380 technician-hours of route time.

Before North and Islands launch, provide repeatable onboarding for every technician: scheduled catch-up sessions, supported first login, and a defined owner for missed training. The current weekly one-hour webinar reaches 20–30 technicians and should supplement, not replace, onboarding. Winter travel must be included in the training plan.

Dispatch adoption shows that a clear cutover works: all 41 dispatchers used Fieldbook scheduling from week one after the legacy spreadsheet was switched off.

## The operating case remains strong once known workflow gaps are closed

Route-aware assignment increased completed jobs from 4.6 to 5.3 per technician per day and reduced travel time between jobs by 18%. Same-day emergency insertion is now automated, with a median completion time of four minutes.

The missing asset-register history offsets these gains. Technicians begin each job without prior service information, call the back office or customer, and in 9% of audited jobs replaced parts already replaced under warranty in the previous year. The requested nightly export has remained in the asset-register backlog since month two.

The completion-code mismatch also creates avoidable work: billing re-keys about 300 job records per week, customers find transcription errors on invoices, and the support desk forwards related calls to the vendor. The vendor says a configurable mapping table takes roughly one day to set up.

Assign an integration owner before expansion to evaluate and schedule the vendor-supported connectors for the asset-register database and invoicing import format. IT considers both straightforward, but rollout staffing covered deployment and training rather than integration. Fieldbook’s parts-ordering screen is unpopular, though testing indicates this is a usage habit rather than a system defect; address it through training rather than technical remediation.

## The financial case supports a gated extension, not an unchanged rollout

Licence and hosting cost £31,000 per month for the four live regions. Overtime is down 12% quarter over quarter and fuel cost per job is down 9%, consistent with the scheduling and travel-time gains.

Unplanned rollout costs have included the 380 lost technician-hours in South and West and a temporary billing clerk costing £8,400 over two quarters. South and West are roughly break-even because of slower adoption.

North and Islands will add £13,500 per month in licences. The economics are favourable if their adoption matches Central and East; a West-style rollout would leave them underwater for at least two quarters. The Q1 gate should therefore require an approved onboarding plan, named integration owner, and launch readiness review.

## Governance must convert early signals into fixes before the second launch repeats them

The support desk logged 1,940 tickets over two quarters. Volume peaked in each region’s third week and then declined, but 44% of tickets were password resets or login problems among technicians who missed training or did not log in during the supported window. Another 19% were duplicate customer records caused by exact-postcode search; the desk merges about 70 each week.

These duplicates split customer job histories until merged. Missing equipment history leaves every job’s equipment panel empty, hiding warranty state and weakening its audit trail for disputes. Manual re-keying causes a 2–4% weekly difference between Fieldbook and invoicing completed-job counts, which finance reconciles at month end.

Make week-four rollout review a decision point for the program office, operations, support, IT and finance. Every negative pattern was visible by week four of the Central launch, yet there was no mechanism to turn observations into program-level fixes, so the same issues replayed in later regions. The vendor relationship is not the constraint: response times meet contract terms, and both known system gaps have vendor solutions awaiting Kestrel decisions.

What I need now: approve the conditional Q1 extension and require launch readiness sign-off on onboarding, integration ownership and the week-four correction process.

Top: Extend Fieldbook to North and Islands in Q1 only after fixing the repeatable rollout blockers.
  1. Reproduce fast adoption through complete, repeatable onboarding.
     - Central and East achieved payback within the second quarter after reaching full adoption within six weeks.
     - South and West slowed because technicians missed the single classroom course and relied on shadowing.
  2. Remove workflow gaps that dilute operational gains.
     - Scheduling has raised jobs per technician and reduced travel and emergency-assignment time.
     - Asset-history and completion-code integrations prevent warranty errors, re-keying and data disagreement.
  3. Protect extension economics with launch gates.
     - North and Islands add £13,500 per month; fast adoption is profitable, West-style adoption is not.
     - Require an onboarding plan, integration owner and readiness review before launch.
  4. Turn early field evidence into program-level corrections.
     - Training and search issues drive most support demand and data-quality problems.
     - A formal week-four review prevents known issues from replaying across regions.