Heartland · Operating analysis
A register of opportunities across eleven operating companies, each sized from data already held in Aspire and rated for how well it is evidenced, with the full supporting studies alongside. Items are ordered by size rather than by ease, and several are open questions rather than findings.
Contents
The full time study. How much of the driving was avoidable, judged only on what the scheduler knew before each week began; evidence that Aspire's route optimiser works but is applied inconsistently; three real weeks mapped before and after; and what the saving is worth in crew hours rather than fuel.
Delivered gross margin per job — which nothing in the platform computes — plus how consistently the price book is applied and what overtime Aspire actually records. Includes a corrected pricing-dispersion table and a correction to an earlier overtime conclusion.
A full accounting of the paid day against the shift clock — where the unbooked time actually sits — and the quality signals Aspire records: warranty labour, review discipline and cancellations. Includes two measures that were tested and rejected.
The client-service deliverable in full, with per-operating-company drill-through. Conversation volume and categories, coverage against the property book, stale close-outs, and the renewal record behind every retention figure quoted elsewhere.
Orientation
Contract value under management
7,441 properties, 44 branches, 11 operating companies.
Value on renewals not retained
From 21,275 renewal decisions in the window.
Labour not reaching a job ticket
19.2% of clocked time, so job costing sees about four fifths of what is paid.
Avoidable driving
Crew-hours over seven months — the most precisely measured item here.
The register
Every item is drawn from data already in Aspire. Size is the best current estimate, confidence states whether it is measured or still open, and effort distinguishes a process change from something that needs building. Only one item is both measured and process-only: the route optimiser.
Retention ranges from 76% to 100% across the 44 branches on $211M of contract value. The gap between the weakest branches and the group median is the largest single number in this analysis.
Next: Take the six branches below 82% retention and read the decline reasons already recorded against their lost renewals.
13.1M dollars of work was delivered below its own recorded cost, 6.5% of priced revenue. Heartland NE and Heritage carry four fifths of it, and in both the loss is concentrated in large jobs rather than a long tail — blended margin sits ten or more points below their own median.
Next: Read the largest negative-margin jobs at Heartland NE and Heritage. The drag figures say a few dozen tickets account for most of it, and they are identifiable today.
Between 57% and 89% of services carry an overridden price, and minimum-price application is effectively unused. At the top of that range nearly nine services in ten depart from the book.
Next: Ask what an override means at Heartland NE, where 89% of services carry one. If overriding is the norm, the book is not the control it is assumed to be.
247,883 overtime hours are recorded across seven tenants — JML at 22.4% of booked hours — while Signature records 471 despite running the longest shifts in the group. Signature's job costs therefore exclude premium pay that its peers include.
Next: Pull OTLaborCost and OTLaborBurdenCost so overtime is money rather than hours, then re-cost margin with premium pay included.
Aspire's Optimize Route feature works — a fifth of crew-days are exactly optimally sequenced, which cannot happen by chance. It is simply not applied consistently, and never on the largest days.
Next: Ask one branch manager why days above about fifteen stops are skipped: the 25-stop cap, the time it takes, or distrust of the result.
Crews clock 3.24M hours but only 2.62M reach a job ticket. Job costing therefore sees about 81% of what is paid, and the missing share is not evenly distributed.
Next: Establish what the off-ticket time is — travel, load, shop, breaks — for one branch for one week, then decide what should be captured.
Crews are clocked on for 3.4 to 7.9 per cent of the shift before any work is booked — the largest unbooked block of the day in almost every operating company, and a morning-start question rather than an end-of-day one.
Next: Ask one branch what happens between clock-on and the first ticket — loading, briefing, or dispatch delay. The data cannot distinguish them.
Completed tickets are reviewed between 4% and 61% of the time depending on operating company, while approval sits at 99.8% almost everywhere. Approval is a formality; review is the only step that checks work before it is billed.
Next: Compare warranty rate and estimate variance between reviewed and unreviewed tickets. If they do not differ, closing the gap is not worth doing.
Actual hours run at 120% of estimate at Heritage and 93% at JML. For Heritage this is roughly five times larger than its entire scheduling opportunity.
Next: Compare Heritage's estimating assumptions against Keesen's, which lands within 0.2% of estimate.
Nothing in the current toolset decides which properties a crew visits together. Regrouping visits within the week they were already planned, without changing crew, removes measurable distance.
Next: Validate with a production manager: how many proposed regroupings survive contact with unrecorded constraints.
Between 3% and 37% of planned visits have no time booked against them. Some are cancellations; the rest is work done without capture. Completion reporting cannot be trusted where the figure is high.
Next: Sample fifty Heartland NE visits with no labour and establish which were cancelled versus uncaptured.
Some weeks could be completed in fewer days. At current day lengths the effect is small; allowing longer days makes it larger but pushes most person-days into overtime, which likely cancels the gain.
Next: Confirm the overtime threshold and premium actually applied, then re-test only against days that carry a premium today.
Retention is 1.5 points lower among properties that had a conversation. Selection is the likely cause — conversations appear to follow risk — but the benefit is currently unproven either way.
Next: Compare conversation date against renewal date, or match on account size and tenure, before scaling the programme.
Five of eight tenants have no yard recorded for any branch, and 9–20% of labour is keyed manually with no usable clock time. Both limit every distance and time measure available.
Next: Enter a yard property per branch using the coordinates derived in this analysis, validated to within 120 metres.
Work tickets carry an invoice reference. Whether completed tickets exist without one has not yet been tested, and unlike the other items here it would be cash rather than efficiency.
Next: Query completed tickets with no invoice reference across all eight tenants. Roughly an hour of work.