Published July 9, 2026
First, Measure the Right Thing
Utilisation conversations usually start with a feeling — the workshop seems busy, the vans are always out. Feelings do not pay wages.
The honest measure is billed hours against attendance hours. An engineer who clocks eight hours and bills five is not slacking; the missing three hours are travel, waiting, paperwork, and parts hunting. You cannot fix the gap until you can see it, person by person, week by week.
Kill the Depot Boomerang
The most common utilisation leak is the return trip: drive to site, discover the part is not on the van, drive back. Two hours gone, customer annoyed, job still open.
Stocked vans with sensible minimum levels kill most boomerangs. The rest die when engineers can request parts from site and move to the next job while the office sorts the delivery — instead of solving logistics from a lay-by.
Let the Timer Do the Timesheet
Ask an engineer on Friday how long Tuesday's job took and you will get a shrug rounded to the nearest half day. Labour recorded from memory is labour lost.
Capture time on the job, in the moment, with a running timer suggesting the entry at completion. It is more accurate, it is billed rather than estimated, and it removes the least popular fifteen minutes of every engineer's week.
Make Sign-Off Part of the Visit
A job that is '95% done' pending paperwork is, for utilisation purposes, not done. It will absorb another slice of someone's time next week.
Close jobs on site: checks completed, job sheet built, customer signature captured, report shared before the van leaves. One visit, one completion. The habit alone reclaims hours every week that used to vanish into admin.
Route Work to Skills, Not Just Postcodes
Sending the nearest engineer is only efficient if they can actually do the job. A mismatch turns one visit into two.
Keep skills and certifications against each engineer and let the planning board respect them. Geography still matters — but a slightly longer drive by the right person beats a short drive by the wrong one every time.
Feed the Findings Back Weekly
Utilisation improves when the numbers are looked at, briefly and regularly. A ten-minute weekly review of billed-versus-attended hours per engineer surfaces the patterns: who is drowning in travel, which job types always overrun, where the parts requests cluster.
Share it with the team. Engineers respond to fair, visible numbers — especially when the fixes remove their frustrations rather than add surveillance.
Sources: Hire Association Europe (HAE)
Frequently Asked Questions
It varies by trade and travel geography, so benchmark against your own baseline rather than an industry myth. Measure billed hours against attendance hours for a month, then target steady improvement on your own number.
Not when it is done openly and the fixes remove friction — stocked vans, fewer return trips, less paperwork. Engineers resent wasted journeys more than they resent fair measurement.
From clock-in and clock-out, ideally in the same app engineers already use for their jobs. Pairing attendance with labour recorded on each job gives you the billed-versus-attended comparison without any spreadsheets.
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