The mid-job trip to the merchant costs an hour of unbilled time, delays the customer, and happens because nobody counted the stock.
TL;DR Track the twenty parts that cover most jobs, not everything. Set minimum thresholds and reorder automatically at those points. Scan materials to the job so your costing is real. Van stock is where the time is won.
Track the twenty, not the two hundred
Full inventory management is the wrong goal for a small service business. The effort of tracking every washer exceeds the value.
Do a Pareto pass
- Pull twelve months of parts usage.
- Sort by frequency, not by cost.
- The top twenty or so items will cover the large majority of jobs.
Automate those. Manage the rest by exception.
The high-frequency items are what cause mid-job trips. A rare specialist part is ordered per job anyway and was never going to be on the van.
Van stock
This is where the returns are.
Build a van stock list per technician or per van type
- The high-frequency items, in the quantity that covers a typical week.
- Consumables, generously. They are cheap and running out is expensive.
- Anything needed for the most common emergency call.
Standardise the layout. Same part, same place, every van. It saves time and makes stock checks visual rather than forensic.
Weekly restock at a fixed time. One person, one trip, all vans. Compare that against each technician making their own trips as they run out.
Track mid-job supplier trips as a metric. Every one is a signal about what should be on the van, and the pattern becomes obvious within a month.
Minimum stock thresholds
For each tracked item, set a reorder point and a reorder quantity.
Reorder point should cover usage during the supplier lead time, plus a buffer for a bad week.
Item: 15mm compression elbow
Weekly usage: ~40
Lead time: 2 days
Reorder point: 60
Reorder quantity: 200
Review the thresholds quarterly. Seasonal work changes usage substantially and static thresholds cause stockouts in exactly the busiest months.
Automatic purchase orders
Threshold hit generates the order. A human approves it.
The flow
- Stock falls to the reorder point.
- Draft PO generated for the preferred supplier.
- Alert to whoever approves.
- One-tap approve, sends to the supplier.
- Goods in updates the stock level.
Keep the approval step. Fully automatic ordering produces duplicate orders, orders during a supplier price dispute, and orders for items you are discontinuing.
Set a value threshold below which it auto-approves. Small consumable orders do not need a decision.
Scanning materials to jobs
This is what makes job costing real rather than estimated.
How
- Barcode or QR scan on the part, in the field app, at point of use.
- Assign to the job automatically.
- Stock decrements, job cost increments.
What it unlocks
- True margin per job, not estimated.
- Accurate quoting, because you know real consumption rather than what you assumed.
- Stock accuracy without counting.
- Shrinkage visibility. Uncomfortable, and worth knowing.
Adoption is the hard part. If scanning adds friction, technicians will not do it, and partial data is worse than none. Test the flow on a real job before rolling it out and count the taps.
A workable lower-tech version: select from a short list of common parts instead of scanning. Less accurate, far higher compliance.
Supplier relationships
Automation does not replace this.
- Consolidate suppliers where possible. Better pricing, fewer accounts, simpler ordering.
- Negotiate on your actual volume, which you now know precisely.
- Ask about stock holding for your high-frequency items. Many will hold stock for a regular account.
- Delivery to site, which removes the collection trip entirely.
- Keep a second supplier warm for the items you cannot work without.
The data from tracking is your negotiating position. “We buy 8,000 of these a year” is a different conversation from “we buy a few”.
Waste and shrinkage
- Reconcile periodically. Physical count against system, on the tracked items only.
- Investigate patterns, not incidents. One discrepancy is noise. A consistent one is a process problem or a person.
- Check for over-ordering, particularly of things that expire or supersede.
- Return unused job-specific parts promptly, while they are still returnable.
Tooling
Most field service platforms include enough inventory function for a business at this scale. Use that before buying anything separate.
What matters
- Stock levels visible in the field app.
- Parts assignable to jobs quickly.
- Reorder alerts.
- PO generation.
- Per-van stock, not just a single warehouse figure.
Per-van tracking is the feature most often missing and the one that matters most for a mobile business. Check for it specifically.
Measure it
- Mid-job supplier trips per week. The headline number.
- First-time fix rate. Rises directly with correct van stock.
- Stock value held, which should not grow faster than revenue.
- Stockouts on tracked items. Should approach zero.
- Material cost as a percentage of job value, tracked over time. Drift means quoting is out of date.
Pull twelve months of parts usage this week and identify your top twenty items by frequency. Stock those properly in every van and the mid-job merchant run largely disappears.
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