How to reduce drive time between jobs

Why drive time matters more than it looks

Drive time is paid time that bills nothing. A tech who spends two hours a day zigzagging across town is losing a job or more every day, and so is the truck burning fuel. It also hurts customers: long drives make late arrivals more likely. The fixes are mostly habits at the booking desk and on the dispatch board, not new trucks.

Set up zones

Split your service area into three to six zones, along natural lines like a freeway, a river or a bridge that everyone hates crossing at 5 pm. Give each zone a home tech or two and, if it helps, home days.

• Zone by geography, not by zip code alone. Two zip codes on either side of a bridge can be 40 minutes apart at rush hour.
• Match zones to where techs live. A tech who lives in the north zone should start there.
• Allow crossover. Zones are the default, not a wall. Skills and emergencies come first.

Start from home when it saves a trip

If techs drive to the shop every morning to pick up the truck and their first job is back near home, you are paying for that drive twice. When techs take trucks home, the first job should be near where they live and the last job near where they will end. Restock with supplier deliveries or a set restock day instead of daily shop runs. See how to manage van inventory.

Cluster at the booking desk

The best routing happens when the call is booked. When a new customer calls, the CSR should look at where techs already are that day and offer the windows that fit. A script that works:

We have a tech in your area Thursday morning between 8 and 11, or Friday afternoon between 1 and 4. Which works better?

Offering two windows that fit the route, rather than asking when they are free, keeps the board tight and still feels like a choice to the customer.

Arrival windows and emergency slots

• Use arrival windows, not exact times. A two- to four-hour window gives dispatch room to order stops sensibly. Exact times force the route to follow the clock.
• Hold emergency space. Leave one open slot per zone per day, or a floating tech, for same-day calls. Filling every slot means the first emergency blows up three other appointments.
• Release the slot late. If no emergency has come in by early afternoon, offer the slot to tomorrow's waiting list or a maintenance visit nearby.

Re-plan tomorrow the afternoon before

Even with good booking habits, the board drifts during the day: cancellations, add-ons, jobs that run long. Spend 15 minutes each afternoon re-ordering tomorrow's stops for each tech, checking that windows still hold and swapping jobs between techs where two routes cross. Then tell any customer whose window changed. The customer-facing change goes out before 6 pm, not at 7:30 the next morning.

A worked example

Example only, with made-up times. Harbor Line Plumbing has two techs, Taylor and Sam, and eight jobs tomorrow across the north and south sides of town, which are about 30 minutes apart. As booked, each tech has jobs on both sides.

Both plans keep every promised window, because two of the swaps only needed an earlier or later stop within the same window. The saving, about 2 hours 25 minutes in this example, is room for one or two more calls. Use the tech capacity calculator to see what extra hours on jobs mean for your shop.

Common mistakes

• Booking the first open slot regardless of where it is.
• Promising exact times to every customer.
• Filling every slot and leaving no room for the emergency that always comes.
• Re-planning at 7 am, when techs are already loading trucks.
• Moving a customer's visit for a two-minute saving. Each change costs a phone call and some goodwill.
• Ignoring skills. The closest tech is no help if they cannot do the job. See how to dispatch techs efficiently.

How SWITCHBOARD handles this

In SWITCHBOARD, Plan the day rebuilds tomorrow's routes to cut driving. It keeps every promised window, each tech's skills and hours, pinned visits and crews together, shows the saving with a plain reason for each change, and nothing moves until you press Apply. When an urgent call comes in, Who's free ranks the nearest tech with the time and skills. After hours, on-call dispatch routes emergencies to whoever is on call.