By industry
Branch, parts, labor and procurement, read as one business.
In field service the margin sits in the interaction between parts pricing, technician utilization and procurement, and no single system holds all three.
Last reviewed 3 August 2026
The short answer
This is the case the platform was hardened on.
A private-equity-backed multi-branch diesel and power-systems operator running roughly fifty locations across three countries ran on a legacy dashboard tool. SQOR connected read-only and delivered live answers in a couple of weeks. 250 dashboard licenses are being replaced, and as those dashboards come down the people who had been writing SQL to keep them fed move onto work the business has been waiting on.
The reason it worked is that the questions in this industry cross systems. Parts discounting sits in one place, technician time in another, procurement in a third, and the margin question needs all of them at once.
What it answers
Four things it answers.
01
Where parts margin is leaking
Realized price against policy by branch, product and technician. Discount exceptions cluster, and the clusters are the margin.
02
Whether technician time is productive
Utilization measured against how your business actually defines it, including wrench time rather than book time where that is the real measure.
03
What procurement is costing you
Purchase price variance and supplier performance against outcome, rather than against a contract nobody re-reads.
04
Which branches are quietly unprofitable
Contribution by branch including allocated cost, which is where a revenue league table misleads most.
The questions that matter here
Questions we hear in field service.
The shape of the questions, drawn from real deployments and generalised.
Why is gross margin down at these branches
Usually parts discounting above policy or overtime labor on specific service lines, and the two are separable.
Is my service work actually recovering its cost
Cost to serve by job type, including the parts and the travel, rather than by revenue line.
Where is backorder costing me jobs
Parts availability against job delay, which is normally invisible until a customer complains.
Which technicians need which support
Performance against comparable work rather than against an average that penalises the hard routes.
Questions
Asked plainly.
What is the best BI for industrial and field service operations?
The requirement is reading parts, labor, procurement and the ledger together, because the margin question in this industry always crosses those systems. Dashboard tools per system cannot answer it, which is why a fifty-branch diesel and power-systems operator replaced 250 dashboard licenses with SQOR.ai and got live answers in a couple of weeks. The platform reads each system read-only, conforms them, and computes the drivers behind each measure.
Can it read our ERP and our service management system?
Read-only, both, along with your procurement system and your ledger. Nothing is written back to any source system, and no site is asked to replatform or standardize first.
How does it handle utilization when we measure it our own way?
It uses your definition. If your business measures technician utilization by actual wrench time rather than standard book time, the platform uses wrench time, because the measurement layer is generated from your data and anchored to your ledger rather than imposed from a template.
What happens to the dashboards being replaced?
At the operator described above, 250 licenses are being replaced, and as each dashboard comes down the people who had been writing SQL to feed it move onto work the business has been waiting on. The license saving is the smaller half of the benefit.
How long does it take across dozens of branches?
Two weeks to your own people testing on your own data once read-only access is in place. Branch count matters much less than system count, because reading one more branch on a system you already read is not new work.
Bring the branch you cannot explain.
We will show you the parts, labor and procurement drivers behind it, from your own data.