Raw

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

**Context**
Fieldbook is live in four regions, delivering strong operational gains and financial payback in Central and East. However, rollout performance in South and West revealed adoption delays driven by training bottlenecks, while persistent integration gaps continue to generate manual work and data errors. The vendor has solutions ready for these gaps, but they require Kestrel action.

**Recommendation**
Extend Fieldbook to North and Islands in Q1, contingent on restructuring onboarding to ensure rapid adoption and scoping integration fixes to protect margins.

**Justification**

1. **Extension delivers strong economic returns when adoption pace matches high-performing regions.**
    *   Operational gains are proven: jobs per technician rose from 4.6 to 5.3, travel time fell 18%, and emergency insertion is now automatic (4-minute median).
    *   Financial benefits are clear: overtime spending dropped 12% and fuel cost per job fell 9%.
    *   Payback is confirmed in Central and East, where the rollout covered its running costs within the second quarter. South and West are at break-even despite slower adoption.
    *   Extension economics remain favourable if adoption replicates the Central/East pattern, even accounting for £13,500/month in licence costs and winter travel expenses for classroom training.

2. **Adoption delays in South and West resulted from training capacity constraints, not platform limitations.**
    *   Root cause was structural: the two-day classroom course ran only once per region, leaving late hires and absentees to learn second-hand. In West, 34 of 118 technicians never attended a session.
    *   Remediation proved effective but costly: improvised shadowing improved uptake but consumed 380 technician-hours of lost route time, driving unplanned costs.
    *   Platform usability is validated by dispatcher adoption: all 41 dispatchers used Fieldbook scheduling from week one, as the legacy spreadsheet was disabled immediately, demonstrating that forced transition eliminates resistance.
    *   Password-reset tickets (44% of support volume) correlate directly with missed training sessions, confirming that onboarding gaps drive support load.

3. **Critical system gaps require immediate action to prevent margin erosion and data integrity issues.**
    *   **Asset register integration:** Missing service history forces technicians to call the back office or replace parts unnecessarily; audited jobs showed a 9% error rate in warranty replacements. The asset register team has the request in backlog.
    *   **Invoicing code mismatch:** Job-completion codes do not match the billing system, requiring the finance team to re-key ~300 records weekly, introducing transcription errors and manual reconciliation.
    *   **Customer record duplicates:** Exact-postcode search creates duplicate records, splitting job history and generating 70 merge requests per week in support.
    *   **Vendor readiness:** Both integration gaps have vendor solutions (mapping table, database connectors) awaiting Kestrel decisions; response times are within contract.
    *   **IT scoping requirement:** IT confirms both integrations are straightforward, but neither was scoped into the rollout programme. Scoping must occur now to avoid delaying extension or repeating manual-work burdens in new regions.

**Required Actions**
*   Restructure onboarding for North and Islands to allow multiple classroom sessions and eliminate reliance on shadowing.
*   Authorise IT to scope and implement the asset register export and invoicing code mapping immediately.
*   Confirm winter travel logistics for classroom training in the northern regions.