Mean time to acknowledge
Mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) is the average time between a work order or service request being created and dispatch or a technician formally acknowledging it, measured before travel or work begins.
The inputs.
- Time to acknowledgmentTime from a work order or service request being created until dispatch or a technician formally acknowledges it.
- Number of work ordersWork orders in the period — the count that turns total acknowledgment time into an average.
- Distinct fromResponse or arrival time. MTTA only measures how long a request sits before someone confirms it's been seen, not when a technician arrives — see SLA compliance rate.
How to read MTTA.
How to calculate mean time to acknowledge
MTTA is the sum of the time from creation to acknowledgment across all work orders in a period, divided by the number of work orders. It's distinct from response time or arrival time — MTTA only measures how long a request sits before someone confirms it's been seen and assigned, not how long until a technician shows up.
Why MTTA matters for commercial contractors
Commercial and mechanical service agreements often write acknowledgment windows into the SLA separately from arrival windows — a facilities manager wants to know the request landed with a real person, not just that a ticket was submitted. A slow MTTA is often the first sign of an SLA breach even when the technician still arrives on time, because the acknowledgment clock started before dispatch ever picked up the request.
What causes slow acknowledgment
The usual causes are manual triage — someone has to read an email or voicemail and manually create a work order — and no defined on-call routing for after-hours or emergency requests. Both are process gaps rather than staffing gaps, which means they're usually fixable without adding headcount.
How Thermal tracks MTTA automatically
Thermal timestamps work order creation and acknowledgment as part of the normal dispatch workflow, so MTTA calculates without a separate log. SLA-covered agreements carry their own acknowledgment window, and dispatch sees requests flagged automatically as that window closes — including after-hours requests routed through on-call coverage.
Questions attached to this term.
How is MTTA different from response time?
MTTA measures time to acknowledgment only — confirming the request has been seen and assigned. Response time (or time to arrival) measures the longer clock from request to a technician physically on site.
How does MTTA affect SLA compliance?
For agreements with an acknowledgment clause, MTTA is tracked as its own SLA metric independent of arrival time, so a contractor can be on time to the job and still miss the acknowledgment SLA if the request sat unassigned too long.
What's a reasonable acknowledgment window?
It depends on the SLA tier and whether the request is emergency, priority, or routine — treat any published number as general guidance and set the window per agreement rather than one fixed company-wide standard.
Does MTTA apply to after-hours and emergency requests?
Yes, and it's often the metric that matters most there, since emergency SLA tiers typically carry the tightest acknowledgment windows and the highest penalty exposure for missing them.
These numbers, on your own book.
If you want to see them calculated from real work orders and agreements rather than a spreadsheet, that's a demo.