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Technician-Days, Not Job Tickets: Your Real Scheduling Unit
Most installation contractors measure their business in job tickets: four jobs running this week, eight projects booked for next month, ten more in conversation with the sales team. It is a natural way to look at the work, and it tells you almost nothing useful when you need to decide whether your team has room for the next project. The unit that actually answers that question is technician-days.
A technician-day is one technician working one full day on a job site. Start measuring work in technician-days instead of project counts, and the scheduling picture becomes something you can read and act on before the month goes wrong.
What is a technician-day?
One technician. One day on site. That is the base unit of everything you can deliver.
If you run fifteen permanent technicians and have twenty-two working days this month, your gross capacity is 330 technician-days. That number does not shift based on how many projects are booked or how confident the sales team feels. It is the ceiling, and it sits above every commitment you make before the work starts.
In practice, not every working day is a full day on a job site. Travel time to distant sites, mobilization at the start of a new project, safety walkthroughs for first-time factory access, and days pulled for internal tasks all reduce the available total. A contractor who accounts for a 15 percent reduction for these factors is working with roughly 280 net technician-days in a month with fifteen technicians. Your exact figure depends on how your projects are structured. What matters is committing to a consistent number rather than treating every working day as if the whole crew will be on a job from start to close.
How many technician-days does each project type actually cost?
This is where the thinking becomes practical. Consider two project types common in Thai factory electrical work:
Commercial and industrial solar rooftop (medium scale, 200 to 500 kWp):
- Crew size on site: 4 technicians
- Typical site days: 8 working days
- Technician-day cost per project: 32 technician-days
Industrial LED retrofit (large factory, 200 to 400 fixtures):
- Crew size on site: 3 technicians
- Typical site days: 6 working days
- Technician-day cost per project: 18 technician-days
Industrial LED retrofit (smaller factory, 60 to 100 fixtures):
- Crew size on site: 2 technicians
- Typical site days: 3 working days
- Technician-day cost per project: 6 technician-days
These numbers are illustrative. Your actual figures depend on site complexity, travel distance, and crew composition. The habit to build is attaching a technician-day cost to each project type you regularly take on, so every new commitment has a number behind it before you agree.
Why does counting jobs instead of technician-days cause problems?
Take a business with 280 net technician-days available this month. The current booked workload is:
- 5 solar installations at 32 technician-days each: 160 technician-days
- 3 large LED retrofits at 18 technician-days each: 54 technician-days
- Running total: 214 committed, 66 remaining
With 66 technician-days available, the business could add ten small LED retrofits (6 technician-days each) or two more solar projects (32 technician-days each) before hitting the practical ceiling.
Now the sales team says four more solar projects are close to signing. In a business counting job tickets, the response might be: great, we will sort out the schedule when they confirm. In a business counting technician-days, the answer is immediate: capacity exists for two of those four. Taking all four would leave the business 64 technician-days over its practical limit.
That shortfall does not appear on the day you agree to the work. It appears at the end of the month, when two projects are behind schedule, crews are being moved between sites mid-job, and the conversations with customers are about delays rather than completions.
What does scheduling by technician-days actually look like?
A technician-day board does not need to be sophisticated. It needs to answer three questions clearly:
- Which technicians are assigned this week, and to which sites?
- Which technicians are free, and from what date?
- Which projects are running longer than their original technician-day estimate?
Any view of the month that answers those three questions in a form the owner and scheduler can scan in under a minute is doing its job. A month-view with each technician as a row and each project as a block of days is usually enough.
The practical gap is not the format of the board but how often it gets updated. A board last touched on Friday afternoon that nobody refreshes until Monday at noon is a guess, not a plan. As technicians move between sites and project durations shift, the board needs to follow. If updating requires tracking down whoever holds the mental version of the schedule, updates get skipped and the board drifts from reality.
The other problem with a board that only shows job names is that it hides utilisation. You can have six active projects and still have crew members with nothing assigned on Tuesday because the job they were on finished early and nobody has moved them yet. A board built around people and days makes that gap visible immediately.
FAQ
Can this work when project scopes vary a lot?
Yes, but the estimate needs to come before the commitment, not after. For jobs where the scope is uncertain at quote stage, use a range and plan against the high end. A business running at 90 percent of a high-end estimate has a margin. A business running at 110 percent of an optimistic estimate is already over before the month starts.
Should admin time count the same as site days?
No. Report writing, photo reviews, and document handling generally happen alongside site work by different people, or outside site hours. Count a technician-day only when a technician is physically on site and unavailable for another job. Admin time has its own overhead, but it does not consume field capacity the same way.
What if our technicians have different skill levels or certifications?
A technician-day from someone certified for high-voltage switchgear is not interchangeable with one from someone who is not. If your project mix requires specific qualifications on specific sites, break your capacity figure down by skill level rather than using a single total. One number works when most of the crew can cover most of your project types. When your jobs require distinct skill sets, you need a capacity figure for each.
The TRACE 30 program builds a month-view board around technician-days as one of its five install steps, so you can see available capacity across the whole crew before the next commitment goes in. Details on how the install works are at /program/. To talk through whether the setup fits your current business, schedule a call.