If you run a team of engineers, installers, cleaners or technicians, you will know that job scheduling, the hardest part of the day, often happens before anyone picks up a tool. Working out who goes where, in what order, with which parts and paperwork, then dealing with the inevitable changes, can take up hours of office time.
Many businesses manage job scheduling with a whiteboard, a shared calendar and a lot of phone calls. That works up to a point. Beyond it, things start to slip: double bookings, wasted journeys, missing job notes and customers ringing to ask when someone will arrive.
What job scheduling and dispatch software does
At its simplest, dispatch software gives the office a single, live view of every job and every person, and gives the people in the field everything they need on their phone. Good systems usually cover:
- Job creation from phone calls, web forms or emails, with all the customer details in one record.
- A drag-and-drop schedule showing who is available, where they are and what skills or vehicles they have.
- A mobile app or web app for staff with job details, directions, site notes, photos and checklists.
- Status updates as jobs move from booked to en route, on site and complete.
- Customer notifications such as booking confirmations, reminders and “on the way” messages.
- Job sign-off with photos, signatures and forms captured on site.
- Invoicing triggered automatically once a job is complete.
The real gains
The obvious benefit is less time spent organising, but the knock-on effects are often bigger. Engineers spend less time driving between poorly ordered jobs. Office staff are not constantly interrupted for updates. Paperwork stops getting lost in vans. Invoices go out the same day rather than at the end of the month, which helps cash flow. And customers get a more professional experience, which leads to better reviews and repeat work.
Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash
Features worth prioritising
It is easy to be dazzled by long feature lists. In our experience, the features that matter most for small and medium field teams are:
- Reliable mobile access, including the ability to view jobs and capture information when signal is poor.
- Simple rescheduling, because plans always change.
- Custom forms and checklists that match your actual jobs, such as safety checks, certificates or inspection reports.
- Integration with your accounts software, so completed jobs flow straight into invoices.
- Clear reporting on jobs completed, time on site and revenue per job type.
Ready-made or bespoke?
There are good off-the-shelf field service tools, and for many businesses they are the right choice. They become less suitable when your jobs follow an unusual workflow, when you need to combine scheduling with other parts of your operation, such as stock, subcontractors or customer portals, or when per-user pricing becomes expensive as your team grows.
A bespoke system can be built around the way your team already works, rather than forcing a new process on everyone. It can also be developed in stages, starting with the job board and mobile app, then adding automated notifications, invoicing and reporting.
Getting your team on board
The best software fails if staff do not use it. Involve the people who will use it day to day from the start, keep the mobile screens simple and roll it out gradually, perhaps with one team first. Make sure that using the system saves the engineer time too, not just the office.
Our operational automations and dispatch service covers everything from mapping your current process to building and supporting the finished system. If your job scheduling lives on a whiteboard and you know it is holding you back, we would be happy to talk it through.
