- Trade & Field Services
Operating Model + Process Redesign · ~5-month engagement
A mechanical services contractor was winning more work than its operating model could absorb. Cash was sitting in the gaps.
Dispatch was reactive. Field-to-office handover ran on paper. Jobs sat in WIP for weeks before invoice — bleeding cash the business needed to fund its own growth. We rebuilt the dispatch-to-invoice workflow and the operating cadence that runs it, in a single joined-up engagement.
Job-to-cash cycle
~3 — 4×faster
From completion to invoice, average across service jobs
Technician utilisation
+15 — 20pts
Billable hours as % of available, measured in the FSM platform
Back-office admin load
~50% ↓
Hours per week on dispatch, job-pack and invoice rework
Margin per service job
+2 — 4pts
Recovered through structured field capture of variations and scope
Sector
Mechanical services · HVAC & refrigeration
Scale
Mid-market · multi-branch · mobile workforce
Practice
Operating Model + Process Redesign
Engagement
~5 months · senior-led
Stage
Scaling under contract-win pressure
01
The Situation
Growth was the problem, not the solution.
A mid-market mechanical services contractor across multiple eastern-seaboard branches — installation, planned maintenance, and reactive service across commercial HVAC and refrigeration. The business had grown rapidly on the back of new contract wins. From the outside, it looked like a scale-up working as intended. Inside, the operating model was buckling.
Dispatch was reactive — the day’s schedule was rebuilt each morning by a small group of coordinators who held the whole picture in their heads. Paper job packs went out, came back, were re-entered into finance by a back-office team that had grown but was still falling behind. The average job sat in WIP for weeks between completion and invoice.
“We’re not losing money on the work. We’re losing money on the time between the work and the invoice.”
— CFO, week one
The brief was unusually specific. Find every day of WIP the business doesn’t need to be carrying — and design the operating model that holds it down once it’s gone. Both, in a single engagement, sequenced so the process redesign didn’t outrun the operating model that would keep it stable.
02
What Was Breaking
Four breakdowns along the same broken line.
The dispatch-to-invoice cycle is the operating spine of any field service business. When the spine drifts, the symptoms feel like separate problems. They are not separate. They are the same problem expressed at different points along the line.
01
Dispatch lived in a few people's heads.
The morning schedule was rebuilt each day on memory, tenure and instinct. There was no system view of capability, location, parts-on-hand or callback risk.
02
Field-to-office ran on paper.
Paper job sheets were dropped at branch and re-entered into finance. Photos and variation approvals lived on phones — sometimes forwarded, often forgotten.
03
Invoicing worked a queue it couldn't see.
The back office worked jobs in arrival order, not in cash-value order. Large invoices sat behind small ones for weeks.
04
No-one owned the cycle end-to-end.
Dispatch reported to Operations, field to branch managers, invoicing to Finance. The cycle that drove cash conversion had no single owner.
03
The Engagement
Process redesign and operating model, built as one engagement.
Field service businesses often treat process improvement and operating-model work as sequential. Without an operating model designed to hold the new workflow, the workflow drifts back inside six months. So we built them together.
PHASE 01
Map the cycle as it actually runs.
Weeks 1 — 4
We mapped the dispatch-to-invoice cycle stage by stage across the branches and quantified where time, cash and margin were actually being lost. Branch-to-branch variance told us most of what we needed.
- End-to-end cycle map across all branches
- WIP-aging analysis on recent completed jobs
- Field shadowing across the job-pack workflow
PHASE 02
Redesign workflow and structure together.
Weeks 5 — 14
Two parallel workstreams. One redesigned the workflow — digital job packs, structured field capture, queue-based invoice triage. The other redesigned the operating model around it — a single end-to-end cycle owner and a weekly cash-and-cycle forum.
- Digital job-pack workflow on the existing FSM platform
- End-to-end cycle accountability identified and assigned
- Cash-value-weighted invoice queue, replacing arrival order
PHASE 03
Roll out branch by branch, hold the gains.
Weeks 15 — 22
We rolled the new workflow out branch by branch, starting with the branch carrying the most WIP. Each rollout was paired with a two-week stabilisation window before moving to the next, so the operating cadence had room to bed in before the next site went live.
- Sequenced rollout across branches
- Coaching of branch managers on the new cadence
- Handover playbook for ongoing cycle review
04
The Outcome
A faster cycle, a leaner back office, and margin that stopped leaking.
Outcomes are presented as indicative ranges typical of the work, captured as early indicators within the active engagement window.
Job-to-cash cycle
~3 — 4×faster
Cycle time from completion to invoice, average across service jobs
Cash started arriving while it still meant something.
Digital job packs, structured field capture, and cash-value-weighted invoice triage collapsed the average cycle by a factor of three to four. The long tail of jobs sitting at six-plus weeks largely disappeared. Variations and scope drift were captured at the job, not chased after the fact — which closed a second-order leak that had been quietly eroding margin.
Technician utilisation
↑15 — 20pts
Billable hours as a share of available hours
The schedule started building itself.
Dispatch moved from people-in-their-heads to a system view of capability, location and parts. Coordinators stopped rebuilding the schedule each morning and started managing it through the day. Technicians spent less time waiting on parts, paperwork and call-backs — and more time on chargeable work. The utilisation gain is real revenue capacity without hiring.
Back-office admin load
↓~50%
Hours per week on dispatch, job-pack and invoice rework
The back office stopped running to stay still.
Paper re-entry, missing-info chasing and end-of-week reconciliation collapsed once the field workflow captured structured data at source. Capacity was redeployed into customer billing and credit management, and the additional headcount that had been planned to absorb the growing queue was no longer needed.
Margin per service job
↑2 — 4pts
Gross margin uplift on reactive service work
Variations stopped going quietly missing.
Structured field capture meant variations, parts and additional scope were recorded at the job rather than reconstructed afterwards. Most of the margin uplift on reactive service work was the recovery of revenue that had previously been lost in the gap between the field and the invoice. The cash conversion gains came alongside this — quieter, but real — as the WIP that had been silently funding growth came back onto the balance sheet.
05
What Was Built
The workflow, the structure, and the cadence that holds them.
Process and operating-model components were designed together. Neither would have held without the other.
Composite illustration drawn from recent dispatch-to-invoice engagements. Identifying client details have been removed. Figures are presented as indicative ranges typical of this work and validated against underlying engagement outcomes.
06
What This Engagement Taught Us
Three lessons for field-service businesses growing through their model.
01
WIP days are an operating-model number, not a finance number. The cash conversion cycle isn’t a CFO problem — it’s a measure of how cleanly the operating model holds together between dispatch, field and invoice. If the cycle is stretching, the model is drifting.
02
Process redesign without operating-model design will drift back. A new workflow without a new cadence to hold it lasts about six months. Build them together, or build the workflow twice.
03
End-to-end cycles need end-to-end owners. If dispatch, field and invoicing each report into a different function with their own KPIs, the cycle has no-one. Name the owner.
- Operating Model + Process Redesign
If your cycle is stretching as your business grows — start here.
The Diagnostic is built to surface the gap between the operating model and the workflow it has to hold. Senior-led, designed for mid-market businesses in construction, field service and care sectors.