GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Tune-Ups & Maintenance Plans

One Van on Repairs, One on Tune-Ups: Splitting Garage Door Maintenance Work

Tune-ups and emergency repairs do not mix well on the same van. A tech halfway through a planned day of tune-ups gets pulled to a broken spring across town, and the rest of the tune-up customers wait. Do that enough and plan customers start to feel like second priority. Giving each kind of work its own van fixes most of that.

Two Kinds of Work, Two Kinds of Day

Billing multi-address accounts is covered in One Monthly Statement for Property Manager and HOA Garage Door Maintenance. This guide is about the vans that do the work.

A repair day is reactive. The van starts with a few booked calls and fills up as the phone rings. An install or tune-up day is planned. The van knows its stops in the morning and works through them in order. Putting both on one van means the planned work keeps getting interrupted by the reactive work.

A common setup in GarageDoorBossPro is one van on repairs and emergency spring calls, and one on installs and tune-ups. Each kind of work gets the kind of day it needs.

Setting It Up

Employees in GarageDoorBossPro have personal PINs and van assignments. Assign your repair techs to the repair van and your tune-up techs to the maintenance van. On the dispatch board, filter by van to see each one's day on its own.

Then build each day differently:

• Repair van. Booked repairs first, with room left for same-day calls: spring replacements, cables, off-track doors, opener repairs, sensors and after-hours emergencies.
• Tune-up van. Due tune-ups from the Waiting List, grouped by area and auto-routed Closest First or Furthest First from the shop. Installs and approved repair estimates from past tune-ups fit here too.

Save a view for each van so the office can switch between them in one click.

The Tune-Up Van's Day

The tune-up van runs from the Waiting List. The office picks a cluster of due-now and overdue visits, assigns them to the van and a day, and auto-routes them. The tech's phone shows the stops in route order, each with the equipment saved on the house, access notes, past notes and the door safety inspection checklist.

Because the van is not being pulled away, the day runs as planned. Customers get their night-before reminder, their on-the-way text and their arrived text at about the time they expected. That reliability is a big part of why plan customers renew. The routing details are in Routing a Full Day of Garage Door Tune-Ups From the Waiting List.

The tune-up van is also the natural home for the small repairs that tune-ups uncover. An approved estimate for new rollers or a bottom seal can ride along on the next tune-up day in that area.

The Repair Van's Day

The repair van is free to react. When a customer calls with a car stuck in the garage, the office can send the repair van without touching the tune-up schedule. Crew GPS on the office map shows where the repair van is, so dispatch can pick the closest opening.

The repair van still feeds the tune-up program. Every repair ends with a plan offer, and every yes becomes a future stop for the tune-up van. See Offering a Tune-Up Plan After Every Garage Door Repair.

When the Split Bends

No split is perfect. Some days need flexibility:

• Storm weeks. When the repair van is overwhelmed, the tune-up van can help. Tune-ups slip a few days, which the 7-day grace on the Waiting List is built for.
• Slow repair days. When the repair van is light, it can pick up a few tune-ups near its calls.
• Commercial days. A third van or a dedicated day for 90-day commercial maintenance keeps docks and rolling doors on schedule.

Because jobs can move between vans on the dispatch board and the tech's list updates when dispatch moves a job, bending the split takes a few taps, not a round of phone calls.

One Van? Split the Day

If you run a single van, you can still apply the idea. Split the day instead of the fleet. Tune-ups in the morning in one area, repairs in the afternoon. Or set aside one or two days a week for planned tune-ups and keep the rest open for calls.

As the tune-up list grows, that schedule gets harder to fit on one van, and that is usually the sign it is time for a second. For how van splits fit into the whole maintenance program, see the garage door maintenance software page.