A Working Day for Mark Stratton

Diagnostic Process Analyst

Mark left school in 1986, and got an apprenticeship in a workshop working on the UK’s biggest Breakdown fleet (the AA). After the completion of his apprenticeship he applied for a role as a Breakdown Patrol and stayed in that role for 8 years working in London, Essex and Kent over that period.

Mark was then seconded to the Fleet department as a Fleet Engineer; one of his roles here was specialist vehicles, project managing on-going updates to specialist breakdown vehicles. This would involve the least amount of down-time possible as these vehicles needed to be out fixing and recovering customers vehicles. His main role in the Fleet department was new vehicles. This involved input on specialist vehicle recovery, health and safety and vehicle testing amongst other things.

Mark left his role with the Breakdown Company after 18 years and embarked on a career elsewhere.

He accepted a job as a Technical Author, writing workshop manuals for the same client in the South East of England that he is working at today for USE*. Mark has had a few different roles here, along with Workshop Manuals he also wrote Wiring Schematics for publication and is at present working as a Diagnostic Process Analyst.

My day starts at 6 am when either my lift share picks me up or I pick him up, we then negotiate our way from Kent to Essex to our Customer's research centre, the M25/Dartford crossing part of our journey normally brings some form of delay at least once a week!

Arrive at work for a 7 am start. Switch the PC on, check emails that have arrived in my in box since I logged off last, reply to any that require replies while the kettles is boiling, then have my first coffee of the day.

I then get on with various tasks that I have. My primary role is analysing diagnostic data for our customer, looking into streamlining diagnostic procedures saving time and money for our customer on warranty costs.

Updating diagnostic software that I use is normally something I check daily as this has to be up to date.

Today I have another project I'm working on; analysing our customer’s European Breakdown service providers data for Commercial Vehicles that are still within their warranty period. This involves liaising with the breakdown provider directly, asking questions from simple things like the type of cover a country provides to more in-depth things like certain countries’ laws regarding roadside breakdowns.

I'm at a stage where I'm breaking down the data into countries and then working out what was fixed permanently at the roadside, what was fixed temporarily at the roadside and what trends, if any regarding vehicles that were recovered back to the dealers. This offers our customer more accurate feedback on what the breakdown provider actually provides at the roadside and in some cases why a certain country may have a high or low permanent fix rate.

Lunch time; this normally involves a trip to the canteen and a choice of the two soups that are normally on offer, back to the desk, soup in hand and a homemade sandwich!.

Today my PC is running slowly and I'm having to do a few re-starts due to an Microsoft Office upgrade that seems to be downloading amongst other updates, not a normal daily delay but they do happen every now and again!

Met a new member of the USE* team here that started today.

Had a one hour meeting with the boss, a regular Monday meeting to keep him updated on how things are going.

An afternoon coffee and back to the data I was working with earlier. By the end of the working day I've got all I need from that - now it's time to work on getting that data into some form of report that is understandable for those that need to understand it!

Now just the trip home to deal with and back again tomorrow.

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