The hidden costs of ‘Wholesaler Counter Culture’

Wholesalers, like any other business, are constantly looking for ways to entice new customers and strengthen their existing relationships. The Wholesaler Counter Culture has been created where engineers meet, have a coffee and even attend a breakfast promotion, whilst collecting parts for the day ahead.

It’s a win-win scenario for everyone, except the housing association or contracting company who actually pick up the cost for these events.

If an engineer had all the parts they needed for their jobs, it has been suggested by a national wholesaler that an additional 4 jobs could be carried out by each engineer every day.

This sounds excessive to us, but we can prove the costs are significant. Have a look at the numbers below:

Activity Time Taken

Travel to the merchant 45 minutes

Queue and order parts 15 minutes

Socialise and Coffee 15 minutes

Breakfast 30 minutes

Travel back to site 45 minutes

That amounts to a massive 2.5 hours and if you’re expecting an 8-hour day from your engineers, that is 31% of the working day.

Now imagine if this were to happen 3 times a week… That would result in almost a whole working day lost every week for every engineer.

Remote monitoring and fault notifications, irrespective of the boiler manufacturer, is the first step in a solution to combat this culture.

The Vericon Connect system will send real time fault notifications allowing faults to be triaged and the appropriate spares ordered and delivered to the depot or direct to the engineer in time for the call-out.

Therefore, with BCM, you will increase your first-time fix rate, improve tenant satisfaction rates, and gain an extra working day from your engineers each week at no additional cost.

BCM currently costs just over £33 per year, which amortised over 5 years is only £0.09 per day.

Whilst the figures above are averages, and some engineers won’t take as long, we know that Wholesaler Counter Culture exists and it does cost your business money. The question is does it cost you more than 9 pence per day?

If you’d like to learn more about Vericon’s Ecosystem and how it can support your team, please fill in the contact form on the right, call on 01242 582555 or email us at hello@vericonsystems.com