Calculate job durations from labour hours automatically
Give your planners more time to organise the work. Build Concierge turns labour hours from incoming instructions into job durations, applying your agreed planning rules before the job reaches your job management system.
Less admin
Build Concierge automates job duration calculations for field service and maintenance teams. It reads the labour hours in an incoming email instruction, converts them into minutes and applies an agreed duration limit before creating the job.
For planners managing service visits, every instruction creates another detail to check. Someone needs to find the hours, convert them into the format the job management system uses and apply the business’s planning rules.
Automating that calculation gives your team a consistent starting point. Planners can spend more time organising engineers and looking after customers.
How it works
For the instructions included in your workflow, Build Concierge:
- Reads the stated labour hours.
- Converts the hours into minutes.
- Applies the agreed maximum duration.
- Creates the job with the calculated duration already entered.
For example, six hours becomes 360 minutes. With an eight-hour limit, the maximum duration entered by this workflow is 480 minutes.
The limit controls the duration recorded on the job. It does not reduce the amount of work required, so instructions exceeding that limit need an agreed planning process.
In practice
Imagine a maintenance instruction specifies six hours for one engineer. Build Concierge converts the figure into 360 minutes and uses that duration when creating the job. The planner has the booking length ready without doing the conversion by hand.
Now imagine an instruction specifies ten hours. With an eight-hour cap, the recorded duration would be 480 minutes. The full ten-hour requirement still needs to be accounted for in the plan, including how the remaining work will be scheduled.
Agreeing that exception process helps your team use the calculation appropriately.
Your setup
We start with the instructions your team actually receives and the job management system you use.
Together, we agree which instructions the workflow covers, how hours are expressed and which duration limit should apply. We also identify cases that need a planner’s attention, such as missing hours or work that exceeds the limit.
We test representative instructions against the results your team expects before the workflow goes live. That includes checking whether the hours describe one engineer’s visit or the combined effort of several people.
Common Questions
Not always. Labour hours measure people’s time. Job duration measures how long the work takes on the calendar. Two engineers working together for three hours contribute six labour hours, but the visit lasts three hours. The workflow must be configured around what the incoming figure means.
Yes. We agree the limit during setup so it reflects the instructions and planning process covered by your workflow. Eight hours is the example used here.
We confirm which formats the workflow can interpret and how unclear instructions should be reviewed during setup. The meaning of a day or half-day needs to be agreed for your business.
This workflow calculates and records the job duration. Engineer availability, travel, breaks and allocation remain separate planning considerations.
That's exactly the kind of document it's built for, a tender with several different types of work bundled onto one spreadsheet. Each line is priced individually regardless of which trade it belongs to.
Give your planners a consistent starting point
Show us how your team receives labour hours today and we’ll explore how Build Concierge can take the calculation off their hands.
Get in touch and we’ll set it up around the way you work.
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