How to Dispatch Crews Across Multiple Sites

For a contractor with sites spread across a region, the largest controllable cost is not labour
or parts. It is travel — and travel is consumed by the order in which jobs are done, which is a
decision made each morning by someone under time pressure.

A day planned purely by urgency will criss-cross a city. The same jobs planned by geography can
often be done with an hour or two less driving, which across a year is a meaningful number of
working days.

Cluster first, sequence second

Group the day's jobs by area before ordering them. Then sequence within each cluster.

This is the opposite of the instinct, which is to take the most urgent job first and work down
the list. Urgency should determine which clusters get done today, not the order of travel within
them.

The practical version: look at the list, identify two or three geographic groupings, decide
which groupings the day covers, then route within each.

Hold back a buffer

A day planned to full capacity has no capacity for the thing that will happen. Something will
overrun, a part will be wrong, a site will be inaccessible.

Plan to roughly three-quarters of the available hours. The remaining quarter is not slack — it
is what absorbs the day's surprises without everything after them collapsing.

Contractors who plan to full capacity do not get more done. They get the same amount done and
spend the afternoon telling clients about delays.

Put access constraints in the plan, not in someone's head

Multi-site work is full of time constraints that have nothing to do with the work: a school that
cannot be entered during lessons, an office accessible only outside trading hours, a site whose
key holder is there on certain days, a building with a service lift booking.

These need to be attached to the site record, not remembered. A crew arriving at a site they
cannot enter has lost the visit and usually the next one too, because the schedule has already
moved on.

Sequence by what the first job might reveal

Where a job could expand — a diagnostic, an unknown fault, something reported vaguely — put it
early rather than late.

An open-ended job at the end of a day either overruns into unpaid evening time or gets rushed. The
same job at the start leaves room to respond to what is found, including bringing forward a
second visit while the crew is still in the area.

Define the emergency rule before you need it

Emergencies will break the plan. The question is whether they break it in a controlled way.

Decide in advance: who has authority to divert a crew, what qualifies, and what happens to the
jobs that get displaced. That last part is the one everyone forgets — a displaced job that is
not explicitly rescheduled simply disappears, and the client finds out by chasing.

The rule can be simple. It cannot be absent, because in the absence of a rule each diversion is
negotiated in the moment by people who are already busy.

Tell the affected clients before they notice

When the plan changes, the displaced client should hear it from you rather than discover it by
waiting.

A short message costs a minute and preserves a relationship. Silence followed by a chase costs
far more, and it is the single most common reason a competent contractor acquires a reputation
for unreliability.

Record what the day actually did

Plan versus actual, briefly: which jobs were completed, which moved, how long things took.

Two patterns emerge within a few weeks. Certain job types consistently take longer than
estimated, which means your quoting is wrong rather than your crews being slow. And certain
sites consistently absorb more time than the work justifies — usually access, parking or waiting
— which is a commercial fact worth knowing at renewal.

Review the routing monthly

Once a month, look at where crews actually went rather than where the jobs were. Excessive travel
usually traces to a small number of causes: a client whose sites are outliers, a rule about who
attends which site that made sense once, or clustering that is not happening because the list is
sorted by date.

All three are fixable. None are visible from inside a single day.