Deliveries repeat, so they forgive mistakes. Installations, exchanges and collections happen once per asset, and each one either sets the machine up correctly for the rest of its life on site or leaves a problem that surfaces months later — a schedule that never started, a machine still being billed after it came back, or an engineer sent to a site that was never prepared for them.
Treating each of these as a job against an asset, rather than an extra stop on a delivery round, is what keeps the lifecycle intact.
1. Survey before you schedule a plumbed-in install
A POU or boiler installation needs mains access, a drain or waste route, an electrical supply, and a site contact with the authority to approve the work. Confirming those at survey stage — and recording them against the site — prevents the abortive install, which is the most expensive single failure in a rollout because it consumes a full engineer slot and delays the customer's go-live.
Bottled installs are lighter, but still need siting, floor loading and a delivery route that can reach the location with full bottles.
2. Give installs a realistic duration, not a delivery slot
An install consumes far more on-site time than a drop. Booked as a job with its own duration and skill requirement, it can be planned against genuine capacity; bolted onto a delivery round as an extra stop, one install will run over and take the rest of the day's route with it.
3. Start the service schedule from the install date
The moment an install completes, the asset should inherit its service, sanitisation and filter intervals, dated from that visit. Schedules created manually after the fact are where the first missed cycle usually originates — and a machine that never entered the due list will not appear as overdue either.
4. Treat an exchange as two jobs on one visit
A swap or upgrade is a collection and an installation at the same address. Both sides need recording: the outgoing asset's history closes at that site and its schedule stops; the incoming asset opens a new record and picks up its own intervals. Recording only the new machine leaves the old one live on the due list and often still on the invoice.
Capture the reason for the exchange too. Repeated swaps against the same model or the same site are the clearest signal you have for retiring equipment or revisiting the installation.
5. Close the asset loop on collection
A collection is not finished when the van leaves. It should return the machine to stock or quarantine, recover bottles, racks and deposits, stop the service and rental schedules, and trigger the final invoice. Assets left open after collection distort both the due list and the billing run.
6. Route lifecycle jobs alongside existing work
Installs, swaps and collections cluster geographically in the same way deliveries do. Where the SLA allows, slotting them into a round already passing the postcode removes a dedicated visit; where it does not, they need to be dispatched deliberately rather than absorbed silently into someone's day.
7. Pre-call every lifecycle visit
Access, not the work itself, is what defeats most of these visits — an unattended site, a machine that has not been emptied, or nobody available to sign off. A confirmation call or message the day before, logged against the job, is the cheapest protection available for the most expensive visits you run.
See it against your own fleet
ProWat manages installs, exchanges and collections as jobs against the asset, starting and stopping schedules automatically. Read the sanitisation scheduling guide.
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