Field Service & Trades// topic
Dispatch, Scheduling and Route Sequencing
In short
Getting the right technician to the right stop: skills and capacity, drive time between service calls, and the emergency that reshuffles a board already full.
7 pages
diagnostics
- Customers swear they never got the on-my-way textThree faults produce one complaint. A per-job trace of trigger, send, carrier receipt and actual arrival tells you which of the three you have, usually inside a week.diagnostic10 min
- Jobs sit in the unassigned queue until a customer calls to askA queue nothing ages out of is not a queue, it is a drawer. The fix is an ageing clock per tier, an owner with a name, and an escalation that fires before the customer does.diagnostic10 min
- One emergency call and the rest of the day is unrecoverableOne emergency should move one job. When it moves five, the cause is not the emergency but a board with no reserved minutes and no written rule about whose afternoon pays for it.diagnostic9 min
- The first call is on time and everything after it slidesMorning stops land and afternoon stops do not, because each job runs past a duration nobody measured and no slack absorbs it. A delta-by-stop-position plot proves it in an afternoon.diagnostic10 min
- The route looked fine at 7am and the drive times are fiction by 11A route that degrades through the morning is hiding two separate faults — a travel matrix frozen at plan time, and the minutes between parking and the front door that no matrix ever contained.diagnostic10 min
definitions
- Dispatched, en route, on site, complete: four clocks, one jobFour timestamps, five spans, and only one is the number a dispatch board should be packing. Choosing the wrong span makes every day optimistic by the same predictable amount.definition6 min
- What a skill matrix has to know before it can pick a technicianA list of names with tags cannot dispatch anything. A usable matrix separates constraints that decide eligibility from preferences that only change the order.definition6 min
Other topics in Field Service & Trades
See allIntake and Call CaptureHow a job actually enters the business — the call that rings at 7pm, the form nobody answers, and what an AI intake agent books correctly versus what it gets wrong.8 pagesThe Technician's PhoneThe app in the technician's hand — offline sync, photos, checklists, serial numbers and signatures captured in a crawlspace with one bar of signal.2 pages
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