100% Booked Is Not 100% Utilized
Your board says every hour is assigned. Payroll says otherwise. Here's the difference between a full calendar and a productive day, and how to close it.
Field notes
Written for the people who actually build the board: owners, ops managers and dispatchers at companies running 5 to 50 trucks. No fluff, no gated PDFs.
Your board says every hour is assigned. Payroll says otherwise. Here's the difference between a full calendar and a productive day, and how to close it.
Feature lists all look alike. Twelve questions that expose what matters: how travel is computed, when feasibility is checked, and what breaks a day.
Scheduling stopped scaling somewhere around truck six. Here is how to tell whether you need another person on the phones or a different way of building the day.
Most field service dashboards track activity, not outcomes. These nine scheduling metrics tell you whether the board is working — and which ones to fix first.
HVAC scheduling breaks in specific ways: seasonal peaks, maintenance agreements, emergencies and variable job times. A system that handles all four.
There is no industry answer to this question worth copying. Here is the arithmetic that gives you your own number, and the four inputs that actually determine it.
Route optimization sequences jobs you already booked. Travel-feasible scheduling decides whether to book them at all. Why that changes what you buy.
Subcontracted crews solve a capacity problem and create a visibility one. How to schedule them properly: availability, assignment, and who sees what.
Narrowing an arrival window before fixing the uncertainty underneath just makes you late. The order of operations that works, and what to watch.
Most field service utilization reports measure the calendar, not the technician. The three formulas, what each is for, and how to get a usable number.
A three-hour arrival window isn't a service decision. It's what a calendar does when it doesn't know the drive. The mechanism, and how to fix it.
Windshield time is the hours your crews spend driving instead of working. How to measure it honestly, what it costs, and the three levers that cut it.