At least since the Escalation update I haven't been able to gain any progress on the repairing ribbon. I have tried on different servers (Miller, Cobalt, Conery), with different characters on different factions (NC, TR), even with different healing tools (granade, passive, repair kit). Nothing seems to be working. My friend has the same problem so im assuming it's a general bug affecting everybody.
Looking at the ribbon progress in engineer directives, one can verify that indeed no progress is added towards the repair ribbon.