The Importance of Documentation in Field Service

We understand that in the multi-vendor support business, the costs and logistics involved in thoroughly training each technician on every product that needs to be supported are overwhelming. A reasonable alternative is to put the right documentation in the hands of technicians who are versatile enough to fix most anything if given a road map. It is up to the service management of a maintenance organization to determine what the appropriate distribution of documentation is for the installed base in a given area.

When we provide support over the phone we must rely exclusively on your ability to accurately answer our questions regarding the symptoms and progress of the fix. You must rely exclusively on our ability to ask the right questions, understand your responses as they relate to a piece of equipment you may be unfamiliar with, and what we can legally send out to you over the fax machine. If we spent an entire day and read a complete maintenance manual to you, you would only get 1% of the benefit of having the manual in front of you.

The maintenance manuals for most equipment do an excellent job at describing the general maintenance and corrective procedures required to keep the equipment operating at peak performance. The parts manuals help you to accurately identify and order the spares you need to correct a problem. The user's or operators guide are essential for you to reference the normal operation, configuration procedures, specifications, and limitations of the equipment.

It is rare that we speak with a support engineer who has any documentation whatsoever. When we ask if the end user still has the operator's guide the answer is usually "no, they lost that a long time ago". An educational process has to occur where equipment purchasers and users need to understand that the information in those books is essential and must be kept in a controlled accessible location. Make a point to express this to your customers on your next trip out. If they feel that "you should know it all" remind them that often there are many versions of a given piece of hardware and that the most accurate version of the documentation for them is what came with the equipment when they acquired it.

Now for the commercial, at CHA we keep the manuals in stock and available for immediate shipment for just about every product we support. Consider making a small investment in the right information on the front end of a service contract that can help you to perform your work efficiently and confidently, and to make that contract a profitable one for your organization.