A technician arrives at a customer’s house. Split unit is not cooling. After a check, the diagnosis is clear: the compressor fan motor has failed. The parts are not on the van, not in stock. They need to be ordered from a distributor and will take three to five days to arrive. The technician explains this to the customer, takes a note on their phone, and leaves.

Three days later: where is that job?

If the answer involves scrolling through LINE messages, checking a notebook someone left at the office, or asking the technician directly — you have a parts-on-hold problem. In businesses that run ten or twenty active jobs on any given week, these “waiting for parts” situations stack up. A few of them will get lost. A few customers will call back angry. A few jobs will be quietly forgotten until the customer gives up and calls a competitor.

This is not a rare failure. It is one of the most consistent ways Thai installation businesses quietly lose money and customers — not through bad work, but through a gap between the first visit and the return visit.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

The issue is that a job waiting for parts looks finished when it is not. The technician has been on site. The job has been diagnosed. Something has been done. But the actual work — the repair that fixes the problem — has not happened yet. The job is in the middle, not the end.

Without a system that tracks this middle state explicitly, the job falls out of view. It is not on today’s dispatch board because there is nothing to do today. It is not closed because it is not done. It sits in a kind of administrative limbo until someone remembers it, or until the customer forces the issue.

The technician placed a parts order through LINE, or called a distributor and noted the order on paper. When the part arrives — maybe while the technician is mid-job elsewhere — there is no automatic trigger. The information about this pending job lives in someone’s head or a message thread, not in the job record.

What a Good Parts-On-Hold Record Contains

The moment a job is placed on hold for a part, the record needs to capture five things:

What part is needed. Specific enough to be unambiguous: brand, model reference, spec (e.g., “compressor fan motor, Mitsubishi MSZGN09, 220V 50Hz”). “Fan motor” by itself is not enough for a distributor to pull the right part.
Where it was ordered. The distributor name and contact — or the purchase reference number if the order is already placed.
Expected arrival date. Even if uncertain, record the estimate. “Three to five working days” is better than nothing. The date tells you when to follow up.
Who owns the follow-up. One specific person responsible: the dispatcher, the technician, or the admin. When everyone is responsible, no one is.
Last update to the customer. What was the customer told, and when? This prevents the situation where the customer gets no news for a week, assumes you have forgotten them, and calls to find out.

This information does not need a complicated system. It needs to exist somewhere that everyone with relevant responsibility can see.

How to Tell the Customer on the Day

The conversation at the job site sets the customer’s expectation for everything that follows. Vague framing creates problems. “We’ll let you know when the part arrives” sounds reasonable but gives the customer no time frame and no reason to trust that anyone is tracking it.

A better framing:

“The fan motor has failed. The part isn’t something we carry on the van — we need to order it from our distributor. I’ll place the order today. Parts like this usually arrive in three to five working days. I’ll call you on Friday at the latest with an update, and we’ll book the return visit as soon as it’s in.”

This tells the customer what broke, what is being done, a time frame, and a specific date for the next communication. They know what to expect and when to expect it. If you cannot keep that Friday call, call them Thursday to update rather than letting the date pass silently.

What Happens When the Part Arrives

This is where most businesses lose the job. The part arrives at the office or on the van, and there is no automatic process to turn that arrival into a scheduled return visit. The part sits in a bag. The job sits on hold. A week passes.

When a part arrives, the next action should happen the same day:

Confirm the part is correct before doing anything else. A wrong part wastes everyone’s time on the return visit.
Contact the customer and book a specific time. Not “we’ll come soon” — a confirmed date and window.
Brief the returning technician. The job record should show what was diagnosed, what part was ordered, what tools are needed. The technician should not need to re-read LINE history or call the first technician for context.
Close the hold status in your job record and re-enter the job into the active dispatch board.

The return visit should be treated like a new dispatch: customer confirmed, technician assigned, time blocked, address clear.

A Concrete Example

A commercial laundry in Nonthaburi calls about a 24,000 BTU inverter split unit not cooling. The technician visits, finds a failed inverter PCB. The board is not stocked locally; the technician requests it through the Mitsubishi distributor in Chaengwattana.

The job is placed on hold with the following record: Part: Mitsubishi MCC4 inverter board, model MUZ-GN24VF. Order placed: Chaengwattana distributor, reference #TH2026-1108. ETA: 5–7 working days, by 10 November. Owner: dispatcher Khun Noi. Customer notified: same day, follow-up call committed for 7 November.

On 7 November, Khun Noi calls the customer even though the part has not arrived yet — confirming ETA and that the order is on track. The part arrives 9 November. Khun Noi calls the same afternoon, books the return for 11 November at 10:00. The technician assigned has the job record on their phone showing the part reference, the original fault description, and the customer’s site contact.

Return visit takes 45 minutes. Inverter board replaced and tested. Service report updated with both visits. Customer happy.

Without a tracked hold process, the most common failure point in this example is the 7 November call — it does not happen, the customer has heard nothing for seven days, they call in frustrated, and the relationship starts from a defensive position.

How Many Jobs Are Currently on Hold?

This is the question that reveals the problem. If you cannot answer it accurately without asking three people and scanning LINE history, the hold process is not working.

At any given time, a business running twenty or thirty active jobs might have three to six jobs on hold for parts. These are real jobs — real revenue, real customers waiting. They deserve the same visibility as jobs being actively worked.

A simple weekly review of open holds takes five minutes: list every job on hold, check the part ETA, note if a customer follow-up is due. If a hold has been open for more than two weeks without movement, someone needs to chase the distributor or call the customer to reset expectations.

FAQ

What if the wrong part was ordered?

Catch this at arrival, not at the return visit. Have whoever receives parts physically confirm the part reference matches the order before calling the customer. If the wrong part arrives, place the correct order immediately and update the customer the same day — do not wait until the return visit date to discover the mistake.

Should we charge for the second visit separately?

It depends on what was agreed at the first visit. If the first visit was a paid diagnostic and the repair was quoted as a separate job, the return visit is the repair job and billed at that agreed price. If the first visit and repair were quoted together, the return visit is part of the same job. Make this clear to the customer at the time of diagnosis — ambiguity at the second visit causes disputes.

How do we stop parts-on-hold jobs from getting lost?

The single most effective change is giving every on-hold job a named owner and a next-action date. Not a general “parts team” — one person. Not “when it arrives” — a specific follow-up date even before the part arrives. When each hold has a human name and a calendar date attached, it does not disappear.

OnSiteQ’s work orders keep hold-state jobs in view alongside active jobs, with the part reference, ETA, and assigned owner recorded — so nothing sits in a LINE message waiting to be forgotten.

Stop Losing Track of Jobs Waiting for Parts