Ready for Work

There’s a commonly used terminology in our industry, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, TOW (Ticket of Work).

I like to think of it as a RFW (Ready for Work) because that’s what your TOW needs to empower the field worker with.

The field worker must know what they need to do, where they need to do it and be appropriately supplied (consumables, tools, equipment) to ensure the organisation has a JIT (Just in Time) approach to field-held inventory, thus reducing CAPEX per worker. They also need to be suitably qualified to perform the activities and armed with the information required to complete them.

l once had a Telco service delivered to my home after 7 truck rolls. Clearly that organisation’s TOW was not an RFW. They had to leave site 6 times without completing a job that had an install fee of circa $100. That’s obviously loss-leading.

The 6 departures were for any number of reasons, including no working at heights certification (my house had 2 storeys), too windy, too difficult to get cables through the house (there were already 2 Telco services installed in the same room), wrong equipment, failure to answer the door (l sat in the front room of the house with the front door open to ensure there were no excuses after 5 previous demobilisations but still received an SMS stating that l wasn’t home when the tech arrived).

That Telco was burning money because either:

  • Their OSS couldn’t provide RFW information
  • The first techs on site couldn’t record suitable details about the job (or perhaps they just didn’t follow correct procedure)
  • The team at headquarters wasn’t analysing the implementation data closely enough to ensure efficiency improvements were being applied

Is your OSS and its supporting team providing ToW or RfW? Do your average truck roll per job metrics support this?

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