Scheduling & dispatch

The schedule that lives on a whiteboard

Two hours every morning deciding who goes where.

Crew, technician, vehicle and appointment scheduling — rebuilt so the plan accounts for skills, travel, parts and availability, and survives the first change of the day.

How it runs today

You will recognise at least three of these.

  • A whiteboard, a shared calendar or a spreadsheet grid, rebuilt manually each morning.
  • The dispatcher holds skills, certifications, geography and personalities in their head.
  • A cancellation at 9:15 unravels the day, and re-planning is entirely manual.
  • Field staff find out about changes by phone call, if they answer.
  • Nobody knows the real utilisation rate, only whether the day felt busy.
The tells

Signals it is costing more than anyone has measured.

  • The business would struggle badly if the dispatcher were off for a week.
  • You are paying for windshield time you could have planned away.
  • Jobs get assigned to whoever is free rather than whoever is right.
  • Customers get a four-hour window because a tighter one can't be honoured.
  • A job arrives on site without the part it needed, and everyone shrugs.
Rebuilt from the ground up

What it becomes.

Scheduling becomes a constraint problem the system solves and the dispatcher supervises, rather than the other way around. It knows who is certified for what, where everyone is, how long the drive really takes, which parts a job needs and whether they are on the van. It proposes a plan; the dispatcher adjusts it, and the adjustments teach it. When the day breaks — and it always does — re-planning is a recalculation, not a rebuild, and everyone affected is told automatically, including the customer. The dispatcher's expertise stops being a single point of failure and becomes the rules the system runs on.

What the system does

  • Assignment against skills, certifications, geography, parts and availability
  • Real travel-time awareness rather than optimistic guesses
  • One-tap re-planning when a job cancels, overruns or an engineer calls in sick
  • Automatic customer notification of windows, arrivals and delays
  • Utilisation, first-time-fix and travel-time reporting that was never measurable before

What it connects to

  • The job or work-order system that creates the demand
  • Inventory and van stock, so a job isn't scheduled without its parts
  • Payroll and timesheets, from actual recorded time
  • Customer notifications by SMS and email

It augments the systems of record you already run. Nobody is asking you to replace your accounting package.

The first release

Where we would start, and how long it takes.

One region or one crew type scheduled in the new system within a fortnight, running in parallel with the existing method. Dispatchers keep an override on everything — trust comes from watching it propose the plan they would have made, several times, before they let it run.

We have built this shape

ZeroFi matches jobs to vetted local pros across hundreds of thousands of profiles in eight countries, and the matching costs the same per job at ten a day or ten thousand.

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