System and method for controlling the elements of parts and labor costs in a facilities management computing environment

A method for controlling labor and material costs for a preventive maintenance (PM) or a service request (SR) task at a customer job site, the method comprising:

• defining an at-work labor rate which includes a fully loaded hourly rate inclusive of additional charges for fuel, trip, and ancillary charges;
• recording, by a technician on a tablet computer at the job site, an arrival time and a completion time;
• verifying the location of the technician during the recording of the arrival time an completion time using a global positioning system (GPS) embedded in the tablet computer;
• displaying a first data set comprising the list of parts;
• prompting the user to select a first attribute value;
• applying the selected first attribute value to the first data set;
• displaying a second data set comprising a subset of the first data set;
• prompting the user to select a second attribute value;
• applying the selected second attribute value to the second data set;
• displaying a final data set comprising a subset of the second data set;
• prompting the user to select a unique replacement part from the final data set;
• defining the total labor cost by multiplying the at-work labor rate by the difference between the completion time and the arrival time;
• and
• defining the total material cost as the cost of each unique replacement part by its attributes.

A computer application embodied in a non-transitory medium for operation by a one or more computer processors for performing the steps of:

• defining a specific at-work labor rate which accounts for an hourly rate plus at least one of:
• trip charge;
• fuel surcharge;
• and an ancillary charge;
• and
• recording an arrival time and a completion time on a mobile computing device for a technician at the job site associated with the SR;
• verifying the location of the recording of the arrival time and completion time using global positioning system (GPS) information for the mobile computing device;
• defining a total labor cost as the at-work labor rate multiplied by the difference between the completion time and the arrival time;
• defining a total component part cost by, for each component part installed at the job site for the SR, displaying a list of parts on a mobile computing device, repeatedly applying an attribute value to successive subsets of the list of parts, and prompting a technician to select a unique entry from a final data set displayed on the mobile computing device;
• generating an electronic work ticket for the SR which includes only the total labor cost and the total component part cost;
• and
• capturing an electronic customer signature for the electronic work ticket.