Introduction

“At Trane, we’re all about air.” So goes the frequently stated maxim at Trane, and it’s one that succinctly describes the company’s commitment to providing the best heating and air conditioning systems in the world.

It’s also a core belief that has led to accomplishments like Trane’s groundbreaking air purification system. And it’s a mission that accounts for almost 2000 new HVAC systems installed every day at famous customer sites like the Statue of Liberty and Bangkok’s International Airport. All told, Trane employs more than 7600 technicians to install and service thousands of HVAC systems around the world.

From Trane’s experienced perspective, you just don’t get – or remain - this successful in the competitive service arena without the courage to make some major changes from time to time. In fact, there are occasions where it will take nothing less to keep customers satisfied and valued workers engaged.

Birth of an idea: Trane ponders going mobile

After spending some time studying their field technicians’ daily work life, Trane felt it was indeed time to take a fundamentally different approach to field service.

“What we had in place was pretty good – for the 1970s,” wryly acknowledged Charlie Johnson, Trane’s CIO and Director of Global Deployment at Ingersoll Rand, Trane’s parent company. To understand what Charlie meant, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a Trane field technician at that point.

After receiving our job orders for the day, usually dispatched by fax or over the phone, we typically needed to make some calls back to headquarters for additional information – then wait for someone to track this data down. Once we arrived at the job site, we might discover an additional issue, where chances were, we wouldn’t have the right parts on us to fix. More calls back to headquarters. More waiting while dispatch tracked down the parts.

Once we finally had the part or piece of data we needed to get down to work, we absorbed ourselves in the task at hand. After all, we liked our job. It was a profession we specifically trained for, and now here we were installing the most respected HVAC brands in the world.