Service Work

Everything Your Best Tech Knows Is in His Head

By Travis Evans, Founder of TradeGOAT · 20+ years in the trades

Every company I have worked for had one guy who knew the machines. He did not know the manuals, he knew the machines themselves. He knew which panel at the hospital has the screw that strips every time. He knew the controller at the bank throws a code that means something different than the book says it means. He knew that one unit takes an odd part because somebody put a non-standard motor in it years ago and never wrote it down.

None of that was written down anywhere. It was in his head. When he was on vacation, the guy covering for him learned it all over again the hard way. When he retired, it left the company with him.

I came up in the elevator trade, but this is not an elevator problem. It is the same in HVAC, refrigeration, generators, pumps, overhead doors, and anything else where you go back to the same piece of equipment year after year. The machine has a history. Almost none of that history is on paper anywhere you could find it.

What that actually costs you

It is easy to treat this as a soft problem until you put real numbers on it.

The second trip. A tech gets there, finds out he needs a part he could not have known about, and comes back tomorrow. That is a truck, a man, and a customer who now thinks you are disorganized, all spent on information somebody in your company already had.

The 3 a.m. call. Whoever is on call is standing in front of a machine he has never touched, at the hour when nobody wants to answer the phone. He can either work it out from scratch or wake up the one guy who knows. Both of those cost you something.

The new hire. It takes a good technician a year or two to learn your customers' equipment, and every bit of that is time you pay for twice. Once while he is slow, and once when the senior guy stops what he is doing to walk him through it.

The guy who leaves. This is the one that should keep you up. Twenty years of knowing your buildings walks out the door in a single afternoon, and you cannot buy it back.

Every machine gets its own page

The fix starts with something plain. Every piece of equipment you service is a real thing in the tool, with its own page, and everything about that machine is on it.

Equipment is right in the navigation, so you can go find a machine the same way you would go find a customer. When a tech opens his dispatch card in the morning, the machine he is being sent to is a link on that card, so he does not have to know its name or hunt for it. When a maintenance visit is coming due, that row points at the unit it belongs to. On the field screen, the search shows what is on his route before he types anything at all.

That sounds obvious. It was not there before, and I know from experience that when the machine is hard to pull up, nobody pulls it up, and everything you were hoping to put on it never gets written.

What we know

On every unit page there is a section called What we know. It is the shared log for that machine, and any of your people who can open the unit can write in it.

Your tech finishes a call, and before he drives off he adds the thing he just figured out. Six months later a different tech is standing at the same machine and reads it. That is the whole idea. It is not a knowledge base project and there is nothing to roll out. It is a place to put what you learned, on the machine you learned it on.

Two fields, not a blank box

A note is two fields instead of one open box, and this is the design decision the whole thing rests on.

The first field is what the machine was doing. The second is what you did about it. That split matters because of how a tech actually uses this. He is not sitting down to read the machine's history. He is standing in front of a unit doing something specific and strange, and he is scanning for the line that matches what he is looking at right now. When the first field is the symptom, he finds it in seconds. When it is one long paragraph, he does not read it at all.

Notes get filed under a few categories that you set. The tool starts you with five that apply to any trade: Fault, Adjustment, Access, Parts, and Watch out. Access is the one everybody underrates, and it is where a tech writes down which panel, where the key is kept, and the trick to the door that cost the last man twenty minutes.

You can rename those or make your own, and the cap is eight. That limit is deliberate. Once everybody can invent a category, you end up with forty of them, nothing is filed anywhere consistent, and the log becomes useless in about a year.

Nobody deletes anything

A technician cannot delete a note on this screen. Not his own, not anybody else's.

He can fix his own wording for a day after he writes it, which is just letting a man correct a typo. After that it stands. The office can archive a note that no longer applies, and archived means it is out of the list, not that it is gone from the record.

I built it that way on purpose. The entire value of a shared log is that it is honest, and it stops being honest the moment somebody can quietly remove the note that made him look bad. If your people cannot trust that what they read is the real history of the machine, they will go back to calling the one guy who knows.

Where this fits with the rest of the work

This is the other half of running your service ticket on a phone. The ticket is what happened on this visit. The machine's log is what is true about this machine across every visit, and it is the part that used to have nowhere to live.

They work together. Your tech is at a unit, he fills out the same ticket he always fills out, he attaches a picture of what he found, and he adds one line to the log about the thing that will save the next guy an hour. Then the repair he spotted becomes work you actually get paid for instead of a note in the corner of a page nobody reads.

What you are building, one call at a time, is a record of your customers' equipment that belongs to your company instead of to whoever happens to still work for you.

Straight about where this stands

This is live in the tool right now. Equipment is in the navigation, every unit has its page, and What we know is on it with your starter categories already set up.

What I will tell you plainly is that it only pays off if your techs put things in it, and that is a habit, not a feature. The one thing I did to make that likely is keep it to two fields and put it on the machine's own page, so writing a note is the shortest thing a tech does all day. Beyond that, ask them for one line per call for a month and look at what you have.