Parts, within a service and maintenance department, can be relatively cheap or very expensive; they can be long-lead, or they can be ubiquitous on service orders. And depending on how a company wants to treat these parts, whether costed on signout or costed on usage, Shepherd’s solution can adapt the way these parts are handled. In this blog, you can learn about giving technicians discretionary use of certain parts and the cost benefits that come with that.
Many users, prior to adopting Shepherd and NetSuite, will have ordered commonly used parts, potentially in bulk. Once received, these are often distributed amongst the technicians that have a common need for them, be it to keep in a van or truck, at a workstation in a shop, depot, or dock, or even in the spares bin on board a boat. The results are the same: they are there, readily available.
Sometimes a company models the parts in different locations and triggers demand planning when a part is handed out. All too often, once that happens, companies treat them as used, though they may not be. This means that when reordering, there is no established way to determine if the previous batch has all been used, or if 95% of them were still in that van, parts bin, or workstation drawer. And that means potentially frequent, growing, and unnecessary costs.
Parts Used vs. Parts Signed Out
Applying Shepherd’s discretionary use means that everything can be distributed, but nothing is ordered until there is a reason to. When does that reason arise? When cumulative service orders show that enough examples of this part have indeed been used, and that letting numbers drop further might cause services to be delayed. In other words, the costing occurs upon usage, not sign-out, which has important GL and demand planning implications. And if these parts, common as they may be, are actually at the expensive end of the scale, the impact on costs saved can be significant, as well as not having capital locked up in inventory that is far greater in number than strictly necessary.
Saving Costs Without Sacrificing Readiness
The root cause of this is that part of being a technician requires being able to work efficiently. And a sure way of helping achieve that is avoiding countless trips to the stock room for something you know will be needed a dozen times that week. And so, multiple parts are signed out at once. When that happens depends on the company policy. It may be that the technician must return unused examples and sign them back in at the end of the day. In other situations, it might be at the end of the week or month. In other cases, they can hold on to them until they need more.
Specific circumstances, especially where a team is small and a query as to where said parts are is nothing more than a raised voice calling across a workshop, may mean companies decide to even forego sign-out altogether, also known as direct fulfilment. The rationale being that while the company may not know where their ten distributed parts are at that given time, they can still say with certainty that they are with one of their team of four, somewhere in the workshop those four work in, adjacent to the stock room. The company has decided that this is a degree of certainty they are comfortable with. And when one part is used, it is logged in the invoicing, over and over, until stock numbers show a reorder is once more required.
Acting on predetermined information
A service that requires an oil change will fall short of success if no new oil is used: that oil becomes an unavoidable part in that service and waiting to add it manually to the service order when the service finally comes around becomes rather pointless.
When a Preventative Maintenance schedule is created and assigned, the agreed list of tasks forms the cornerstone of the maintenance plan. Shepherd’s system uses this to generate service forecasts, which then generate service orders. Alongside the scheduling of tasks, the required parts are already determined, ensuring they are accounted for in warehouse stock, planned for procurement, and reflected in the financials.
The benefits are extensive. For the service provider, it is one less thing to remember—or forget. It removes repetitive administrative steps and reduces the chance of oversight. It also provides clarity over stock needs and costs well in advance, enabling better planning for procurement and avoiding shortages or excess inventory.
Forecasting also made easier and further reaching
Financially, having parts reserved ahead of time improves confidence in revenue forecasting. It also allows customers to anticipate costs over the life of the contract, giving them greater certainty in their own budgeting. If a part’s usage is predictable through service schedules and contracts, Shepherd’s system can reduce time and admin through configuration.
Once a service order of a predetermined type is issued, those parts are immediately added by the system, and the inventory, and parts lists in PTM also reflect the action. Once PTM has been updated, the stage is set for a seamless billing process to follow. The PM Parts feature ultimately turns what was once a manual, repetitive task into a built-in safeguard for efficiency, predictability, and smooth service execution.
Preparing the parts needed upon reporting, not inspection
Related to the above is Shepherd’s feature called Allocated Parts that allows service providers to put known parts aside for work that is needed even if not included within a service plan. Examples might be fixes for failures where the part is already known at the time of reporting, rather than inspection, such as a worn-out tire of a particular fleet vehicle.
If we know the vehicle, we know the tyre model. And if it is worn-out, a technician’s on-site inspection is hardly necessary before deciding a tire is needed to get that vehicle back on the job. And so, the part can be reserved there and then, becoming one of the parts listed that the technician will need to load up in preparation for their visit.
The service manager can activate this function as soon as the customer is off the phone and, whether the technician is heading out that day, or for a scheduled call the week after, makes no difference— that tire will be set aside for them, waiting to be loaded up, taken to site, fitted, and billed for.
Why trust a third party with your revenue source
But what happens when the item is not for installation during a service, but for delivery, and it is not a part but a complete piece of equipment? Some customers provide the hardware as well as the technicians to service it later. When that happens, with members of the service team driving out to sites regularly, hiring a separate company to deliver the asset seems somewhat pointless. The only obstacle is a means of tracking the expense, or in this case, the saving.
Once a customer has bought an item and only delivery remains, Shepherd allows its users to give its technicians access to the relevant direct inventory fulfillment receipt for that purchase. The technician’s new, passing role as a delivery service means the paper trail of purchase completion, from the point of view of NetSuite, will take place via the intermediary of the technician and his truck, and not through a delivery company that would also bring its own costs, invoices, and VAT to the mix.
Less time and paperwork helping things to go right
This is even before recognising the absence of headaches if anything were to go awry during a delivery company’s stewardship of the item or items in question. The net result is a cheaper, and faster service, with more reliable delivery times and fewer moving parts or stakeholders. While there are no physical barriers to a technician taking a company good that has been bought to the customer in his company vehicle, there are administrative barriers.
It is those that Shepherd provides keys to in the access permissions a given technician can have, allowing that worker to get inventory fulfillment access, not just service order access in NetSuite. Without that, the system could not tell the difference between an item leaving the warehouse with the requisite authorisations and not.
Flexible Configuration for Real-World Workflows
Whichever handling of parts is most convenient, cost-saving, or time-saving, whichever suits the existing parts handling policy or allows for that policy to be changed in a structured way, Shepherd’s solution is a configuration away from making it possible. As always, the driver is user satisfaction, not programming ease, so request a demo of Shepherd’s potential in your organisation.
