Every field service business has one...
The engineer whose van was built to carry tools and get them to the next job, but has slowly evolved into something closer to a mobile branch warehouse.
Every shelf, bin, and spare inch of floor space carries parts that might be needed one day. Motors, pumps, valves, relays, sensors, and fittings, gathered up over months, sometimes years, of jobs and never quite finding their way back into the system. A quietly growing stash of “just in case” stock that exists somewhere between the warehouse, the job sheet, and the asset register.
Then comes stock take.
Suddenly there's a very different conversation happening. The store manager wants to know where thousands of pounds’ worth of parts have been hiding. The service manager is fielding awkward questions from above, and the finger, more often than not, points in one direction.
“The engineers are hoarding stock.”
Fair enough, sometimes that's true. But more often, engineers are simply adapting (in the only way available to them) to processes that keep letting them down.
Ask any technician why their van looks the way it does, and the answers tend to be the same wherever you go:
None of that is engineers making excuses for themselves. The average first-time fix rate across field service sits at around 80%, meaning one in five jobs still needs a second visit, and insufficient parts availability is consistently named as one of the leading causes. Get let down by the system a handful of times and the lesson sinks in fast: the only way to guarantee tomorrow's jobs get done is to hang onto everything today. Let’s call it what it actually is: a rational response to a system engineers have learned not to trust.
Here's the trouble with a van full of “just in case” stock: every part sitting in it works like a plaster over a wound nobody's treating.
The more stock builds up, the easier it becomes to miss the real problem underneath.
The organisation responds, understandably, by buying more stock, holding more stock, and budgeting for more stock. None of that comes cheap. The Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply points out that holding costs stretch well beyond the price paid for the part itself, covering capital tied up in stock, storage and insurance, and the risk of it becoming obsolete before it's ever used. Multiply that across a fleet of vans each quietly carrying their own private stockpile, and the “just in case” habit stops looking like harmless caution and starts looking like a genuine cost centre hiding in plain sight.
The costs climb. The symptoms appear to shrink. Until the next stock take rolls round, and the whole cycle starts again.
There's an old idea in Lean manufacturing, one that traces back to Toyota's Taiichi Ohno, who used to describe inventory as water sitting over a riverbed full of rocks. Keep the water level high, and the rocks, the actual problems, stay safely out of sight. Lower it, and there they are.
Field service works the same way. Excess van stock is the water level. It's remarkably good at hiding operational weaknesses that would otherwise be demanding attention right now. Bring the “just in case” stock down, and the real questions surface fast.
Why aren't parts arriving on time? Why do allocations keep going wrong? Why does returned stock disappear instead of reappearing in inventory? Why don't engineers trust the process enough to let go of what they're carrying?
The best field service organisations aren't chasing the biggest van stock. They're chasing the most reliable process, one where an engineer knows, with genuine confidence, that the right part will turn up in the right place at the right time, without them having to squirrel it away first.
Get that right, and hoarding tends to sort itself out. Nobody keeps a spare gearbox in the back of a van for fun. They keep it because, somewhere along the line, the system taught them they had to.
“When we talk to service businesses about van stock, the conversation almost always starts with the engineers and ends up somewhere else entirely. Dig into why a technician's carrying half the warehouse around with them, and it's rarely about the person. It's about a process that hasn't given them a reason to trust it yet.”
— Alan Bailey, Head of New Business, Solarvista
So next time a stock take turns up a mountain of unaccounted parts sitting quietly in the back of a van, resist the urge to start with the engineer. Start by asking what problem they were protecting themselves from. The answer will probably tell you a lot more about your processes than it does about your people.
Because the goal was never simply to hold less stock but to build a system reliable enough that nobody feels the need to hoard it in the first place.
If this has you eyeing up your engineers' vans with fresh suspicion, it might be worth a closer look at what's driving it. Our brochure walks through how Solarvista brings parts tracking, stock visibility, and job history together in one place, so technicians have every reason to trust the system and leave the spare gearbox at the depot.
Download the Solarvista brochure and see how it could work for your team.