What Happens to an Appliance Repair Job That's Waiting on a Part

The technician is standing in the customer's kitchen and says the sentence that decides whether this visit is the last one: "I need to order a part." At Cactus Appliance, an appliance repair company in Orange County, California, that runs on Taskrol every day, that sentence comes up on close to every call. Cactus handles about 150 jobs a month, and a large share of those jobs don't finish on the first visit. Here's what happens to that job at Cactus, from the kitchen to the install.

Most of what gets written about scheduling covers the first visit, which is the part that works everywhere. The job that can't close today is where an appliance shop makes or loses its money, and it's the half that gets skipped.

The job goes to In Progress and stays there

Cactus doesn't close the job and doesn't open a second one. The same job moves to In Progress and sits in that status until the part is in the machine. It stays on the same board as everything else, so if someone in the office filters the work order list by In Progress, they're looking at every job that's waiting on a part.

The part belongs to the technician who ordered it. He ordered it, so he's the one who knows what's coming and notices when it shows up. Nobody at Cactus has a job called watching the parts queue. There's a job with a status on it and a technician who wants to finish it.

Who calls the customer

Depends on the shop. When it's one man and a van, he calls the customer himself, because there's nobody else to do it. When there's an office, the operator makes the call. Cactus has an office, and it still goes both ways there. Some days the technician calls, some days the office does, and which one it is depends on the day.

Same day, or the next business day

What happens next sorts by where the part is. If it's on the truck or on the shelf at the shop, the repair finishes the same day. Sometimes, when the schedule allows it, the technician makes a run to the supply house and does the install the same day. Everything else is the next business day. That's the rule at Cactus.

Next business day is possible for one reason. The shop knows what it owns before the technician leaves the kitchen.

Why it's a stock question, not a calendar question

Here's what the technician does in that kitchen. The model number is on the job, so he searches the part right there. Taskrol shows him whether it's in his van and which cell it's in, and whether it's on the shelf in the warehouse. He doesn't call the office and he doesn't wait for someone to walk back and look. If the shop owns it, today. If it doesn't, the part goes on the shopping list from the same screen and the job stays In Progress.

A calendar can't book the install until somebody knows whether the shop owns the part. Put that answer on the technician's phone while he's still standing next to the appliance and the rest follows. The part is on the shopping list before he's back in the truck, and the second visit isn't waiting on a phone call to find out what's on the shelf.

That's why we say a scheduling problem in this trade turns out to be an inventory problem. The calendar is the easy half.

Nothing gets lost, but the speed differs

Jobs waiting on parts rarely get forgotten: the open job is sitting in the appliance repair CRM, In Progress.

What does differ from shop to shop is the clock: how long from the sentence in the kitchen to the part in the machine. At Cactus it's the next business day, and it's that number because the stock check happens in the kitchen and not later. If your number is longer, that's the place to look.

Putting it on tomorrow's calendar

With the part in hand, the install goes on the calendar and the map like any other job. At Cactus the dispatcher plans and optimizes the route on the day's map, where the visits are pins numbered in schedule order, each with its arrival time. The first question on any job is who can do it, and a dispatcher who knows the crew answers it before looking at the drive.

This post describes one shop's process, not a comparison. For the whole field, we ranked fourteen scheduling products on this same question, with each product's real strengths named.

One thing to check in your own shop

Take one job from last week that needed a part and count the days from the kitchen to the install. If the answer is next business day, your process is fine, whatever software it runs on. If it's longer, don't start with the calendar. Start with where the stock check happens, and how far the technician is from the customer when it does.