Why We Can’t Just “Do It While We’re There”

At Melfire, we genuinely try our best to look after everyone.

Sometimes that means doing a little extra while we’re already onsite. If we’re there for a monthly inspection and someone asks, “While you’re here, could you just isolate the panel?” or “Could you change that detector?” our natural reaction has always been to try and help.

We want to be flexible, easy to deal with and, most importantly, we want to look after our customers.

But sometimes, trying to help everyone actually means we end up looking after no one properly — including our own team.

And there is something else we’ve learned along the way.

“Can You Give Me the Date of the Next Monthly?”

This is a question we get regularly, and here’s the surprising part:

We usually don’t know yet.

It’s not because we’re disorganised. It’s because programmed fire maintenance doesn’t work quite the way people might expect.

We know the month the service is due. We know the building needs to be serviced. But what we don’t always know months in advance is the exact day our technician will be there.

You might be thinking:

“Wait… why would I pay someone who doesn’t know exactly when they’re going to do the job?”

And that’s a fair question.

Unless, of course, you’ve worked in Operations for Delta Force and have mastered the art of moving thousands of people around on a schedule.

For the rest of us in maintenance, it’s a little more complicated.

The Economics of a Monthly Inspection

Here’s something that isn’t always obvious from the outside.

A programmed fire maintenance visit might seem relatively expensive to the customer, but that doesn’t mean it is inexpensive for the contractor performing it.

Think about calling a plumber to your house because you have a leak. They might charge a minimum call-out fee of $200–$300 just to send someone to your property with a van, equipment and their time.

That fee has to cover much more than the plumber’s wages. There’s superannuation, workers’ compensation, holidays, vehicle costs, fuel, tools, equipment, stock carried in the vehicle, administration, accounting, training, maintenance, software, management and all the other overheads involved in running a business.

Fire maintenance has many of those same costs.

The difference is that a monthly fire inspection might only generate around $120 for the visit.

That means we have to operate extremely efficiently.

A technician may need to complete more than 12 inspections in a day just to make the economics of that maintenance round work.

And that is where things become difficult.

Delays can happen when:

• an inspection takes longer than expected;
• access isn’t available;
• a technician has to wait for someone;
• traffic causes delays;
• an emergency call-out comes in;
• an additional job is added to the day; or
• extra time is spent completing work that wasn’t part of the scheduled inspection.

The delay doesn’t just affect one job. It can affect the entire day’s schedule and potentially the entire month’s maintenance round.

So Why Don’t We Just Come Back?

This is the part that can be difficult to explain.

If a technician is already at the building, it can seem completely reasonable to say:

“Can you just do this while you’re here?”

And sometimes, absolutely, we can.

But when we do that repeatedly across hundreds of buildings, those extra five, ten or twenty minutes add up very quickly.

A technician doesn’t have unlimited time.

Our vehicles don’t have unlimited hours.

Our schedule doesn’t have unlimited space.

And our team certainly doesn’t have unlimited energy.

What might look like a small favour at one building can eventually mean a technician is running late to another building, finishing later than planned, skipping breaks, working under unnecessary pressure or even being unable to complete another scheduled inspection.

That isn’t fair to the next customer, and it isn’t fair to our staff.

We’ve Realised We Need to Change

For a long time, we’ve tried to accommodate these requests wherever possible.

“Just do it next time you’re there.”

“While you’re there, can you have a look at this?”

“Can you isolate this?”

“Can you change that detector?”

“Can you give me a call when you’re coming?”

We wanted to say yes. We wanted to be helpful.

But we’ve realised that constantly saying yes isn’t actually good customer service if the result is that our technicians are under pressure, schedules become unreliable and other customers are affected.

So we’re changing the way we approach it.

That doesn’t mean we don’t want to help. Quite the opposite.

It means we want to make sure we’re helping in a way that is planned, properly resourced and fair to everyone.

If something needs to be isolated, repaired, replaced or investigated, we’ll organise it properly.

If you want to meet our technician onsite, we’ll do our best to coordinate that.

If additional work is required, we’ll schedule the appropriate time and resources.

And if something is genuinely urgent, we’ll treat it as urgent.

But we can’t promise that every extra request can simply be squeezed into an already programmed maintenance visit.

Maintenance Isn’t Just About the Building

At the end of the day, fire maintenance is about keeping buildings safe — but there are people behind every inspection.

There is a technician getting up early, driving across town, carrying equipment, climbing ladders, testing systems and working through a schedule that has been carefully planned to keep hundreds of buildings compliant.

There is an operations team trying to coordinate access, vehicles, technicians, customers and urgent jobs.

And there is a business trying to provide a professional service while covering the very real costs of employing people and keeping everything running.

We want to look after our customers, but we also need to look after our people.

Because the best service isn’t necessarily the service that says “yes” to everything.

Sometimes, the best service is saying:

“Yes, but let’s schedule it properly.”

And yes… we really do need to go home at the end of the day.

If you have additional works that need to be completed, or you’d like to discuss your maintenance arrangements, call Melfire on 1300 134 971.

We’re happy to help — we just need to do it properly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Have a question about how Melfire schedules monthly fire maintenance?

Here’s a quick explanation of how programmed servicing works and why some visits cannot be booked to a fixed time.