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Blog
34 articles on maintenance, field service, support, customers, projects and processes. With examples, common mistakes and what to measure. You can read them without knowing attendo: a short note on how we handle it comes at the end.
Subscribe via RSSPreventive work, assets and KPIs that help you decide · 9 articles
Everyone says preventive maintenance is cheaper, but few companies prove it with their own numbers. That is why it is the first thing dropped when an emergency hits. Here is the math, including the uncomfortable part: when corrective is the right call.
The hard part of preventive maintenance is not designing the plan. It is keeping it alive past the first few months. When a plan is abandoned, it is rarely for lack of will. It was usually sized wrong from day one.
Both formulas fit on one line. The hard part is making the number mean something. Here are the formulas, a complete example and the three mistakes that turn these KPIs into decoration.
There are lists of thirty maintenance KPIs out there, and almost nobody uses thirty. These are five that change decisions, each with its trap, plus the ones you can usually drop.
Every maintenance project starts with the inventory, and many get stuck there. Not because it is hard, but because it is tedious. And if it is done badly, everything that comes after inherits the problem.
Fifteen questions and five minutes to see where your maintenance operation stands on work orders, preventive plans, KPIs and tools, and where to start. You do not need any software to answer them.
Streetlights, street furniture, trees or a network of installations spread across a city. Your customer already has that inventory in a GIS. Re-entering it by hand throws away their work and loses where each item actually is.
Asking a subcontractor for their documents once is easy. The hard part is knowing what has expired on the day they show up to work in your building or at your customer’s plant. Documents expire quietly, and nobody notices until someone asks for them.
Spain’s new technical instruction asks elevators already in service to get closer to the safety of new ones. For owners, that means upgrades and paperwork. For maintenance companies, it means visits on schedule, defects with deadlines and proof of every visit.
Work orders, routes, on-call and what an hour really costs · 8 articles
The problem with paper work orders is not the paper. It is that they arrive late, incomplete and without evidence, and nothing gets billed until they do. Many projects to digitize them fail, almost always for the same five reasons.
Paper costs nothing. What costs money is everything that happens between the technician filling in the form and the cash landing in your account. Here is the math for an example company with 20 technicians, and how to do yours in an afternoon.
Many service companies set their hourly rate by looking at the competition, and few have done the math. Those who do usually find the same thing: they charge less than it costs them.
A checklist ticked without looking is worse than no checklist at all. It takes time, creates paperwork and gives confidence nobody has earned. And the culprit is almost never the technician: it is the design.
It is one of the questions that comes up most when work orders go digital, and one of the worst answered. Some say “of course” without any nuance; others simply do not know. An honest answer has to separate three things.
Everyone wants the button that optimizes routes. Almost nobody has sorted out what that button needs first, and without it the button is of little use.
On-call service is easy to sell and hard to run. It is usually built on a group chat and the goodwill of two people, and it lasts until those two people leave.
The work you subcontract is still your service in the customer’s eyes. What gets lost is not the work itself. It is knowing whether the job was accepted, when it will happen and what was used. A few simple rules bring that back, without burying anyone in paperwork.
SLAs, channels, surveys and AI in customer service · 5 articles
Signing an SLA is easy. Proving you meet it is another matter, and that is where renewals are lost. If you provide the data yourself in a spreadsheet, the customer has every right not to believe it.
A shared inbox is the spreadsheet of customer support: it works fine until it stops working. And by the time you notice, you have already lost things.
In Europe, Latin America and many other markets, customers already message companies on WhatsApp, whether the company decided to or not. The question is not whether to use it, but whether it is set up to work or still lives on someone’s phone.
We keep hearing that AI will transform customer service. Some things it has already changed, and others still do not work well. It is worth telling them apart before you spend money.
Many surveys fail before they are sent: they ask too much, arrive too late or use the wrong channel. And when someone answers with a 3, nothing happens. Here is how to design them so they get answered and get used.
Profitability, renewals and sales forecasting · 3 articles
Almost every company knows how much it bills each customer. Far fewer know how much it costs to serve them. And the business lives in the gap between those two numbers.
Losing a customer on price hurts. Losing one because you forgot has no excuse. The contract renews itself year after year, until one day the customer gives two months’ notice and there is nothing left to discuss.
Everyone has a pipeline. Few have a forecast they trust. The difference is not the tool: it is how the stages are defined.
Deadlines, hours and the real cost of each project · 2 articles
Almost every project drifts. The problem is finding out at the wrap-up meeting, when there is nothing left to fix. A baseline lets you see it in week two, not in the final week.
Asking a team to log their hours usually sounds like surveillance. And when it happens on Friday, from memory, the data is useless. It can be done in a way that costs little and pays off, including for the people logging.
Automation, approvals and controls with evidence · 4 articles
Automating the wrong process costs you twice: the time to build it and the time to undo it. Three simple questions separate what is worth automating now from what is better left alone.
Approving by email works until someone asks who approved what, and when. Then the search through other people’s inboxes begins. A well-built approval process answers that question in seconds.
Doing a control and being able to prove it are two different jobs. The second one usually surfaces on audit day, when someone spends a week hunting for emails, screenshots and signatures.
An ISO certificate is not earned on audit day. It is earned with what the company records every week. Management system standards ask for less paperwork than people think, and more consistency. Here is what they ask for, what they share and how to organize it.
What to ask, how to write an RFP and how to switch without stopping · 3 articles
Take this list to every demo. It works with any maintenance software vendor: buyers who ask good questions end up with the right software. And it is better to find out before you sign than three months later.
A badly written RFP goes wrong in one of two ways. Either it leans toward one vendor and invites a protest, or it is so generic that the cheapest, weakest bid wins. This guide is about avoiding both.
The idea is appealing and the fear is reasonable: replacing the systems your company runs on sounds like weeks of chaos. It can be done without anyone noticing, but not all at once.
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