TRADE Dispatch and scheduling
A dispatch board your office can read at a glance.
The whole day on one screen: every crew, every job in order, the hours, and where each job stands. The same jobs show up on each crew member's phone, and their taps move the board without anybody phoning in.
The day board
One line per job, one block per crew
This is the real dispatch board in Saw Time, shown with a made-up demo company. Each man's jobs are numbered in the order he will do them, his first job of the day stands out, and the week's hours run along the bottom.
How it works
From the office to the truck and back
In the office
- Day, week and map. The day board, a week view per truck, and the day's jobs on a map.
- A job order window built from yours. Customer, site, contact, time, hours and the description of work, with the customer's past contacts a click away.
- Move the order of a day. Change which job a man does first without retyping anything.
- Warnings before the truck rolls. Customers on hold, cash-only customers and overdue balances are flagged on the board.
- Missing job tickets. A list of finished jobs with no ticket against them yet.
- Print job orders. One sheet per job, for the crews or the file.
In the truck
- His jobs, in order. Each crew member sees yesterday, today and tomorrow on his phone, his own jobs only.
- Tap for directions. The address opens the phone's own maps app.
- Call the contact. One tap.
- Status from the field. His punches move the job to in route, on the job and job complete, so the office does not have to call to ask.
- Start the job ticket. From the job, already filled in.
Trucks on the map
Where the trucks are, beside where the jobs are
If your trucks carry GPS trackers, Saw Time shows them on the office map with the day's jobs, lists each truck's stops and drives for the day, and flags a job the board says is in progress while the truck is somewhere else. Truck locations are for the office only; they are never shown on a crew member's phone or time card.
Trackers are optional, and which ones you use is part of the quote.
Already have a dispatch system?
You don't have to switch on day one
Changing dispatch systems is the riskiest part of any switch, so we don't ask you to. For a company that dispatches from Peak DSM, we built a way to copy the DSM board into Saw Time on a schedule, with the day's hours checked against DSM's own totals, so the office keeps working the way it does while the crews start using their phones. When you're ready, the office moves over too.
If you use something else, we look at what it can export and tell you in the quote what's possible.
Questions
About the dispatch board
Do crews see each other's jobs?
No. Each crew member's phone shows only his own jobs. That is enforced in the database, not just hidden on the screen.
Does the board update when the crew taps on the phone?
Yes. When a crew member starts driving, gets to the job or finishes it, the job's status moves on the board. The office can still change any status by hand.
Can it work alongside the dispatch system we already have?
Often, yes. We built an automatic copy from Peak DSM for a company that still dispatches there. For other systems it depends on what they can export, and the quote will say.
Does it need GPS trackers in the trucks?
No. The board and the crew's phones work without trackers. Trackers add the truck map and are optional.
Can more than one person dispatch at once?
Yes. The board lives in your own database, so everyone in the office sees the same jobs.
Part of one system
Show us how you schedule. We'll build the board around it.
Send a screenshot or a printout of how your day is scheduled now. We'll answer plainly: what we'd build, how long it would take, and what it would cost.