How to size a dispatch day around drive time, not around the calendar

Most dispatch boards are sized from the calendar. An eight-hour day, two-hour blocks, four jobs. The drive is assumed to fit inside the blocks somewhere.

That works until it doesn't. A truck that starts across town, a job that sits at the edge of the territory, a 4:30 p.m. drive through traffic: each one eats into the same fixed shift, and the fourth job slides into overtime or gets pushed to tomorrow.

The alternative is to size the day from the drive first. You know the shift length. You know roughly how long the first drive, the last drive and the drives between jobs take. Subtract those, and what remains is the time you actually have to sell.

The formula for one truck

Use these letters:

• S = shift length in minutes, from leaving the shop (or home) to getting back
• D1 = first drive of the day
• Dn = last drive back
• J = average job length on site
• d = average drive between jobs

A truck can do n jobs if D1 + n × J + (n − 1) × d + Dn ≤ S. Rearranged:

n ≤ (S − D1 − Dn + d) ÷ (J + d)

Round down. That is the number of jobs the day can hold without overtime.

Notice that the between-job drive d sits in the denominator next to the job length. Every job you add brings a drive with it. That is why drive time scales with the number of jobs, and why short-job trades feel it most. A pest control or appliance repair route with 40-minute stops loses more of its day to driving than an install crew that sits at one site.

A worked example

This is an illustrative example with invented numbers. Use your own.

A truck runs a nine-hour shift (540 minutes). The first drive and the drive back are 35 minutes each. Jobs average 75 minutes on site. The board as booked has 25 minutes between jobs.

Ten minutes less driving between stops turned a four-job day into a five-job day. With 25-minute drives, the fifth job would have needed 545 minutes: it missed by five.

That is the important thing about job counts. They are whole numbers, so the effect of drive time is lumpy. Most days you are either comfortably under the threshold or just over it. A day that is just over it is the one where a dispatcher squeezes in the fifth job anyway, and the last customer gets a late tech and the tech gets overtime. See overtime cost for what that does to the margin on the job.

Where the between-job drive comes from

The 25 minutes in the example is not a property of your territory. It is a property of how the day was booked.

If the five jobs were promised on five separate phone calls, each agent picking any open block, the stops are scattered across the map and the truck crosses its own path. If they were booked with the drive checked against the jobs already on that truck's day, the stops cluster. Same territory, same customers, different d.

Three habits that pull d down:

1. Book from the previous job, not the shop. Compute the drive to a new job from where the truck will be at that hour. A slot that looks open on the calendar may be 50 minutes from the job before it.
2. Anchor, then fill. Place the long or fixed-time jobs first. Offer the remaining slots to customers near those anchors before you offer them to anyone else.
3. Give areas a day. If a truck is in the north end Tuesday, Tuesday is the first day offered to north-end customers. This is zone scheduling in its lightest form.

None of these need software. All of them are easier when availability already knows the drive, which is the idea behind travel time scheduling.

What to do with the leftover

In the four-job day above, 95 minutes are left over. That is not enough for another 75-minute job plus its drive (100 minutes). It is enough for something shorter.

Count it this way: a short job fits if d + J_short ≤ leftover. With 25 minutes of drive, a job of up to 70 minutes fits in 95 minutes. A 45-minute maintenance visit, a follow-up, or a quote visit nearby would all fit.

This is why it pays to keep a list of short, flexible jobs: tune-ups, inspections, warranty checks, estimate visits. They are what turns leftover time into a stop instead of an early finish or a slow afternoon.

From one truck to the fleet

Run the formula per truck, not as a fleet average. Averages hide the trucks that start far away. A tech who lives 45 minutes from the territory has a different D1 than one who lives in the middle of it, and the formula will tell you that tech's day holds one fewer job unless the first stop is placed near home.

Then add it up. Say your fleet of 10 trucks moves from four jobs to five on half its days. That is 5 more jobs a day across the fleet, with no new hires. Whether you can sell those jobs is a separate question, but you can't sell capacity you don't know you have. The technician capacity calculator runs the fleet version.

Plan the day, then protect it

A planned day still drifts. A job runs long, a drive hits traffic. Two things keep the plan from falling apart:

• Re-check the remaining day when a job runs long. If the third job will finish 30 minutes late, the question is whether job four still fits, not whether the tech can hurry. If it doesn't fit, move it early and tell the customer.
• Measure plan against actual. At the end of the week, compare planned d with the real gaps between departure and arrival. If real d is consistently higher, your booking is optimistic, and your job counts are too.

Where CrewLink fits

CrewLink, in early access, does the booking half of this for you. Online booking only offers start times a qualified tech can make, counting their other jobs, time off and the drive at that hour from the previous job. On the dispatch board, the live board shows each tech's status and the ETA to their next job. When a tech's mid-job check-in asks for more time, the rest of that tech's day re-flows: later jobs that no longer fit go to a teammate who can make the same time or move to the nearest open time, and the customers are texted.

The formula above still matters. It tells you what a good day looks like, so you can tell when the board is giving you one.

Common questions

How many jobs per day should a technician do?

Work it out from your own shift, drives and job length: subtract the first and last drives from the shift, add one between-job drive, and divide by job length plus between-job drive. Round down. Published averages vary too much across trades to be useful. The jobs per day calculator does the arithmetic.

How much drive time should be in a technician's day?

There is no universal number. Measure your own share: total drive minutes divided by shift minutes. Then watch the between-job drive specifically, because it grows with every job you add and is the part booking decisions control.

Should the first job of the day be near the tech's home?

If techs start from home, yes, when you can. The first drive is paid time with no job attached. Placing the first stop near the tech's start point shortens it and can make room for one more job later in the day.

What should a dispatcher do when a job runs long?

Re-check whether the rest of the day still fits, starting with the next job. If a later job no longer fits, move it to another tech or another time early and tell the customer, instead of letting the tech arrive late.