The quarter ends and the Q2 visits are still open
It is the last week of the quarter. The service manager opens the PPM spreadsheet and counts the visits still marked open: a dental group's split systems, two office floors of VRF indoor units, a restaurant chain's kitchens, a school's server room. Most are not late because anyone forgot. They are late because every week in June a hot spell brought breakdowns, and breakdowns always win the engineer.
Now some clients will get two visits in a fortnight, some will get one late, and one contract's filter changes will quietly slide into next quarter.
Why planned work loses to reactive
A PPM visit has a due window, not a deadline that screams. A breakdown has a client on the phone. Without protected capacity and a clear view of due work, planners fill the week with whatever is loudest. The underlying problem is that PPM obligations are not in the scheduling tool in a usable form. They are in contracts, and in a spreadsheet someone built from them.
- Frequencies differ by contract and by system type: quarterly, biannual, annual.
- Visits are planned per site from memory, not from due windows.
- Asset lists per site are out of date, so visit lengths are guessed.
- Nothing reserves engineer time for planned work in the summer.
- Late visits are only discovered at quarter end.
What late PPM costs
Clients pay for a service they did not get on time, which becomes a problem at renewal and sometimes in a contract review meeting. Filters and coils left too long cause more breakdowns in exactly the weather you are already busy in, so skipped PPM feeds the reactive queue that caused it.
There are quieter costs as well. Visits squeezed into the end of the quarter are rushed. Engineers are sent to the same site twice in a month for different systems because nobody grouped them. And if your contracts include F-gas checks with the service, a missed visit may also mean a missed check.
The planner we build
- Each contract's asset list and frequencies go into the planner: every system, its location, the tasks per visit and the time your engineers say each takes.
- Due visits are generated with a window, not a single date, and grouped by site so one attendance covers everything due there.
- Visits are clustered by area and offered to the scheduler alongside reactive work in your job management system, such as Simpro, Joblogic or BigChange, or in a planner we provide.
- You set protected capacity per week for planned work, which the scheduler can see and only override with a reason.
- Engineers get the site's task list and asset details in their app. Completion updates the next due date automatically.
- A dashboard shows per contract what is due, booked, complete and overdue, weeks before quarter end rather than after it.
| Planning step | From the spreadsheet | From the planner |
|---|---|---|
| Working out what is due | Counting rows | Generated from contract frequencies |
| Grouping visits | By memory | By site and area |
| Engineer time | Whatever is left | Protected weekly capacity |
| Visit length | Guessed | From asset list and task times |
| Spotting slippage | At quarter end | Live, per contract |
Task lists and frequencies are your engineers' and your contracts' decisions. The planner turns them into scheduled work.
Planned work that happens when planned
The service manager sees slippage while there is still time to fix it. Clients get visits in their windows, grouped sensibly, so a site sees one engineer for a morning rather than three across a month. Engineers arrive knowing every unit they will service. When breakdowns surge, the protected capacity makes the trade-off visible, and a decision to borrow PPM time is taken deliberately, with the catch-up already in view.
At renewal time, you can show each client exactly when every visit happened, which is a stronger position than a spreadsheet and good intentions.
Signs your PPM needs a planner
- PPM visits bunch up at quarter end.
- The PPM schedule lives in a spreadsheet.
- Engineers visit the same site several times a month for different systems.
- Summer breakdowns regularly push planned work back.
- You could not say today which contracts are behind.