The repair doesn't fail at the door. It fails in the van.

A ship's wheel in a plumber's van

In a car park, a small team emptied a plumber's van. Copper fittings. Valves. Seventeen rolls of PTFE tape. Things he used every day, things he'd forgotten he owned. By the time they stopped, more than £6,000 of stock was laid out on the tarmac. At the back they found a ship's wheel.

Plenty of stock, but not necessarily the stock the work requires. The question is not how much stock you have, but whether the right material is available when the repair needs it.

From Housing Repairs ER, chapter 2: "The Ship's Wheel".

One part short. Five consequences.

1. The part isn't there. The engineer opens the van and the job has already changed shape.
2. The merchant trip. Travel and queueing: paid engineer time producing no repairs.
3. The second visit. If the part can't be collected, the job is rebooked. One repair is now two.
4. The chasing calls. The tenant rings to ask what happened. The contact centre absorbs demand the repair created: failure demand.
5. The backlog grows. Every repeated visit takes a slot from the queue. Capacity leaks, so the backlog looks like a staffing problem.

None of this shows up in a materials budget. It shows up as a first-time-fix rate nobody quite trusts, engineers who seem permanently stretched, and a repairs backlog that survives every recovery plan.

Eight practices that separate best practice from a black box

1. Visibility: you can see what's on the vans, live. Per engineer, per part. Not a spreadsheet from the last stock take, but the actual state of the fleet today.
2. Replenishment: van stock follows actual usage. What each engineer carries is set from what they actually fit, reviewed regularly, not a standard list from years ago or whatever fits in the van.
3. Ordering: one route to every supplier. Engineers and admin aren't juggling half a dozen merchant portals.
4. Merchant trips: collecting materials is the exception. A trip to the merchant mid-job is treated as a signal that something upstream failed, not as part of the job.
5. First-time fix: parts failures are measured against repairs. You know how often a second visit happens because the part wasn't there, because you link the two and track it.
6. Stock loss: shrinkage and dead stock are managed, not discovered. Write-offs are visible as they happen, not found in a year-end reconciliation.
7. Cost of stock: you know what's tied up. The money across vans and stores is a live number someone looks at.
8. Ownership: one owner, end to end. Materials management doesn't fall between stores and repairs.

The Stock Management Best Practice Score rates your service against these eight practices.

Make the right parts available where the work happens

The Low Effort Method starts from a simple observation: most repairs problems aren't caused by people. They're caused by the way the work is designed. Materials are one of the clearest examples: an engineer who turns up without the right part was set up to fail before the van left the depot.

That makes stock management one of the fastest places to release hidden capacity. The repairs are already scheduled; the engineers are already driving to them. The question is only whether the work can be completed when they arrive. It is step three of the Low Effort Method, the step we work on with Stock Right Now.