Technicians are often called expensive. They are not. Driving them around is.
Why it matters
Take a loaded labour cost of roughly $38 an hour and a fleet cost in the region of $0.60 a mile. A route that gives back 20 minutes of driving per technician per day frees about $12 of labour and a few dollars of vehicle cost. Across eight technicians and 250 working days that is a number worth a meeting — and it was spent on nothing.
The verified range for what disciplined routing returns is 10–25% of drive time. That is the band we quote, because it is the band we have seen hold.
How you notice it slipping
The first sign is usually the route shape, not the clock: a day that crosses its own path, or a single stop that sits twenty minutes outside the cluster because somebody promised a morning visit. The second sign is fuel spend rising faster than job count.
What to do
Track drive time as a share of the paid day, per technician, per week. Anything above a third deserves a look. Then find the stop that caused the detour and ask who promised it, and why — the answer is almost never the technician.