Parts delays, approvals, escalations, and the breakdowns that respect nobody's schedule. That is the day job for Khaled Ramzi, who runs field operations here, and for his team.

He scaled vehicle operations at Kyte before this, and worked on hard problems at EY-Parthenon before that, which is a fair summary of the role: take chaos, make it repeatable.

We asked him four questions. His answers run below, edited lightly for punctuation and length. First, a look at what his team is managing.

What an RO passes through

An RO (repair order) is not one event. It is seven, and each one can stall.

• Intake, from an FMS (fleet management system) or FMC (fleet management company) handoff, a driver with a QR code or a texted VIN (vehicle identification number), a fleet manager, a mobile vendor, or a telematics fault.
• Routing to a shop that can take the vehicle now and has done this repair well before.
• Estimate review against pricing, warranty, and maintenance policy, line by line.
• Approval, which is where most calendar days quietly disappear.
• Parts and ECD (estimated completion date) management, including the supplement that shows up on day four.
• Transport in and out, because a finished vehicle sitting in a shop lot is still a vehicle out of service.
• Invoice review and payment to the shop.

Three numbers tell you whether that chain is healthy, all from data you already have. Cycle time is the hours between the repair request being created and the vehicle going back in service, not the shop's version of it. Touches per RO is human actions, calls, emails, and approvals, divided by ROs closed. Supplement rate is supplements divided by ROs, the cleanest read on whether estimates are written honestly the first time.

If we shadowed you for a day, what would we see?

"Each day looks a little different depending on the meetings I have lined up, but I try to keep my calendar as light as possible so I have time to make real progress on projects and think ahead about how we should be doing things in the future. My best deep work usually happens in the morning between 9 AM and 12 PM, before the day fills up with conversations and collaboration. Afternoons are often spent meeting with my team or other department leaders to align on priorities and remove roadblocks."

"I handle admin work throughout the day, but I like to clear my inbox early in the morning and again before wrapping up. When projects are nearing the finish line or there's a deadline approaching, I don't mind working past 6-7 p.m. That's often when I do some of my best work, without distractions or escalations coming my way. I also make sure to take a proper lunch break and step away for prayers. As a practicing Muslim, that time grounds me, even if I'm not always perfect about doing them exactly on time. It's something I'm continuously working on."

What project are you proudest of, or most excited to build next?

"We're currently working on a project to map out every individual step in our operations and formalize how tasks are created, assigned, and tracked to completion. The swimming lanes in our department can sometimes get blurry, with multiple people touching the same repair order. Our goal is to simplify that, give people clear ownership and the ability to focus on making their part of the operation excellent. We've been interviewing team members to deeply understand existing workflows and pain points, and we evaluated more than 15 workflow and project management tools before landing on the one that fits our needs best. Right now, we're drafting the implementation plan, and I'm really excited to see it come to life and measure the impact it'll have on how efficiently our teams operate."

The detail worth stealing is the ownership problem. When several people touch the same RO, the vehicle waits at the seams between them and nobody's queue looks bad.

What industry trend are you watching?

"There's a growing expectation for transparency and control in vehicle repair. For most people, the process still feels like a black box. You drop off your car and just have to trust what the shop tells you. At ServiceUp, we're changing that by using technology to make every step visible, from estimates to parts tracking to communication. At the same time, there's a massive appetite across the industry to understand how AI can reshape operations."

Visibility has a specific test. Without calling anyone, can you say where each vehicle is, what the shop is waiting on, what the current ECD is, and what changed since yesterday? If that takes a phone call, the reporting is decorative.

What keeps you building here?

"I'm a through-and-through automotive enthusiast, so any opportunity to shape how people engage with their vehicles or extend their lifespan gets me excited. I love being part of an industry I genuinely care about and leaving my fingerprint on how it evolves. Beyond that, the team at ServiceUp is a big source of motivation. We've built a culture of driven, hungry people who want to make an impact. Leadership doesn't put people in a box. Ideas are valued, challenged, and often turned into action. It's a place where you can think big and actually see your ideas come to life."

What to do with this on Monday

• Timestamp all seven stages on your last 20 closed ROs. The stage with the widest spread is your real process.
• Name one owner per stage. Not one owner per RO.
• Count touches on your five slowest ROs from last month and ask which of those touches a policy could have settled.
• Check how many supplements arrived after approval. That number sets your estimate review standard.

ServiceUp handles those seven stages for fleets that would rather not staff them. Here is how that works. Another operator, another set of answers, next episode.