Scheduling technicians without the schedule being out of date by ten o’clock

Why scheduling technicians is so difficult

Scheduling technicians is difficult because six uncertainties are in play at once: urgent calls that break up the day, work whose duration only becomes clear on site, travel, each technician’s skills, the parts that may or may not be in the van, and absences. A schedule that ignores one of them will not last until midday.

On top of that, the schedule has to be right in two places: at the office and with the technician on the road. If those two versions drift apart, someone drives to a customer who has already been helped, or a customer waits for someone who never comes.

When Excel or a shared calendar is no longer enough

A spreadsheet or a shared calendar works with two or three technicians who see each other every day. A few signs that it is no longer enough:

• Work that still needs to be scheduled is scattered across mailboxes, notes and the planner’s phone.
• A technician sets off with a printed schedule that is already wrong by nine o’clock.
• A double booking or an appointment on a day of leave is only noticed when the customer calls.
• The office does not know whether an intervention has started, been interrupted or been completed, unless it phones someone.
• For an urgent call, the planner first has to ring five people to find out who still has time.

Six steps to a schedule that holds up

1. One queue for everything that is not yet scheduled. Calls, emails, maintenance visits and reports from customers go onto one list, each with a priority. What is not on that list does not exist for the planner.
2. Schedule by day and by technician, with the absences in view. Leave, public holidays and working hours are on the same line as the interventions, so that a conflict is visible before you confirm it.
3. Keep room for the unexpected. A day that is fully booked to the last minute breaks at the first breakdown. If you get urgent calls, deliberately keep room free, or let one technician handle the urgent interventions.
4. Schedule by location, not just by time. Visits in the same area on the same day, in a logical order, save kilometres and leave room for an extra intervention.
5. Check the parts before the technician sets off. An intervention without the right part means a second trip. More on this in van stock.
6. Let the status come back. On the way, on site, in progress, completed: if the technician passes on those steps in their app, the planner sees the real day instead of the planned one.

Fitting in an urgent intervention: an example

A quarter to eleven. A customer calls: the installation in his plant room has stopped. The planner sets the intervention to urgent and looks at the day of the technicians in the area. One technician has just started a maintenance visit that will take another two hours; the other has a free slot at one o’clock. The planner drags the intervention to that slot; if it does not fit, because it falls outside working hours or overlaps another intervention, the schedule shows that straight away. The technician finds the new intervention in their app, with the address and the work instructions, and starts the navigation from the intervention.

How it works in Digitalnatie Service Suite

The planning and service orders module brings all of this together on one screen, with a day, week, map and routes view.

• Unscheduled interventions: the queue of work that does not yet have a technician or a time, which you can filter on urgent interventions and breakdowns.
• Drag and drop: an intervention goes onto a technician’s line in quarter-hour steps. While dragging, you see what is in the way: another intervention, leave, a time outside working hours.
• Conflicts: a double booking or work on a day of leave gets a coloured border; the conflicts counter also includes work outside working hours. Whether a double booking is allowed depends on your organisation’s setting.
• Priorities: normal, important, urgent and critical, each with the response time your organisation sets; that response time determines the deadline on the intervention.
• Map and routes: the day’s interventions on the map, fixed routes per technician and weekday, and an optimisation that proposes the order of the visits. That optimisation does not change the times; it only sets the order.
• Positions: the map shows a technician’s last known position, the position of their last action in the app. It is not live GPS tracking.

The technician sees their interventions in the mobile app, in the order of the day. A change to the schedule appears for them when the app updates; there are no push notifications.

Frequently asked questions

Is it better to schedule technicians by day or by week?

Both. By the week, you set down the predictable work, such as maintenance visits and follow-up appointments. By the day, you adjust for urgent calls, absences and work that took longer. A schedule that only exists by the week does not keep up with the day.

Can I see where my technicians are?

In Service Suite, the map shows the last known position of each technician: the position of their last step in the app, such as setting off or arriving. There is no continuous GPS tracking.

Does a technician get a notification when I change their schedule?

There are no push notifications. The changed schedule appears in their app as soon as it updates, for example when it is opened. For an urgent change, it is best to give the technician a quick call as well.

What if a technician is ill?

Approved leave appears on their line in the schedule. Their interventions are not moved automatically: you take them out of the schedule, so that they are back in the queue, and schedule them with a colleague.

Can recurring maintenance end up in the schedule by itself?

Maintenance contracts automatically create an intervention on the date of the next visit, with the contract’s technician if one has been set. You then schedule the visit like any other intervention. Read more in tracking maintenance contracts.