A Day in the Life of an AC Services Engineer

AC Services Southern’s business is all about keeping catering’s Rational ovens going through maintenance and repair. We have a group of trained engineers out on the road for almost 365 days a year. We’re often asked what do they do? So, here’s Jon’s day on a Monday at the end of January.

Monday Morning

Preparations for the first calls of the week are always done on a Friday with phone calls to confirm it’s still ok to attend. (The rest of the week, it’s the afternoon before.) This allowed Jon to collect late on Friday afternoon, the required spare parts for his first two jobs. These had both previously been estimated.

Jon lives in Weston. So a 40-mile drive to JD Wetherspoons William Dampier to complete 2 different estimates at the same time. One had been made in December and a second fault occurred in January. Combining reduces the inconvenience and interruptions on the kitchen; as it typically continues to work around our engineer. It’s also more cost effective given third party maintenance contractors often need a visit to fault find and a second to repair. Having arrived at 9.30, Jon was away by 11.45 with both ovens fully back in service.

His next job was in South Petherton some 9 miles away at the Lopen Raj. They had become a customer of ACS in September 2022, when they called us to service one of their ovens. At the beginning of January in a deep clean, they had moved the oven. Unfortunately they caught the dial and pulse generator, which had snapped off. We’d called the next day to repair only to discover after calling Rational to confirm, that the Raj had a unique pulse generator. This needed to be ordered. With the proximity to the William Dampier it was convenient for all to slot this job in next. Jon completed the job by 12.30; not bad given the travelling time.

Monday Afternoon

At the start of the day, Monday afternoon was clear of appointments; but Jon has been an ACS engineer for 24 years and knows that will never be the case. Overnight Wagamama Trowbridge had placed a service call via their app requiring an urgent visit on Monday. Two of their ovens, a combi duo stack and another oven, had no function. Jon headed 50 miles North to thoroughly test the ovens. As a result, he upgraded their software to the latest settings and identified that the cause of the issue was an electrical supply fault. This required an electrician to correctly rate the circuit breaker in the fuse box.

Day over you might think as gone 3.00, but no. We’d had a call from a school with a report that the oven was not getting hot enough. The visit needed to be after the lunch break. Sadly, the cause of the fault was operator error, with oven temperatures set to Fahrenheit not Centigrade. On the plus side Jon also resolved a software update problem on the same machine.

Only Half the Story

With Jon home by 6.00, you might think that was a busy day, but it doesn’t explain the half of it. Engineers have to:

• Do a mental health and safety risk assessment when on site particularly with other staff working around them in small spaces
• Write out job sheets and explain them to chefs or maintenance contractors about what they’ve done or found
• Take HACCP and service data from the ovens, ensure software is up to date and upload new software where appropriate from the Rational portal.
• Fill out mileage forms and ensure vans have fuel. Then there’s the part numbers for the estimates and job sheets. And reporting on parts fitted for the bill.

We could go on, because added to all of this is the customer service and back-office staff that get the engineers efficiently to our catering colleagues in need. But we’ll leave that to another time, while we thank Jon and our other engineers for their greatly appreciated hard work.

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