The diary is not the problem, the ripple is #
Ask most trade firms where the scheduling pain is and they will describe building the week. Sit in the office for a day and you will see something different. The week gets built in an hour on a Friday or a Monday. The rest of the time goes on repairing it.
A boiler that was a service turns into a parts job. A roof that was two days becomes three because of what was under the felt. Somebody calls in sick. A customer is not in. Each of those is one event, and each one produces a fan of consequences.
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The engineer needs telling
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The next two customers need telling
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The merchant order needs moving
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The job that was going to be squeezed in now cannot be
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Somebody needs to remember to rebook the one that got dropped
That fan is the cost. It is not intellectually demanding and it is not optional, and it arrives at the worst moment, which is while somebody is already on the phone to somebody else.
The split, stage by stage #
Runs on rules
- Who is qualified and ticketed for this work, if the records exist, because a qualification is a fact with an expiry date rather than an opinion
- Whether the day is physically possible, because travel time and job duration are arithmetic
- Confirming the appointment to the customer: same message, same trigger, every time
- Reminding the customer the day before, which is the single cheapest way to cut no access visits
- Triggering the re-notification when a job overruns, because who needs telling is derivable from the diary
Every one of these is notification or arithmetic.
Needs a person
- Who actually goes, which depends on the customer, the engineer, and what you know about both
- The wording of that re-notification, because what you say to an annoyed customer is not derivable from anything
- Deciding what gets dropped when the day breaks, which is a commercial decision about which customer you disappoint
That is a useful result, because it means the thing to look at is not a smarter scheduler.
The constraint that is not negotiable #
If your firm runs vehicles that need a goods vehicle operator licence, which a good number of M and E contractors, roofers and builders do, the diary has a legal ceiling on it. Under the Great Britain domestic drivers hours rules, GOV.UK states that "in any working day the maximum amount of driving permitted is 10 hours" and "in any working day the maximum amount of duty permitted is 11 hours".
Where a vehicle needs an operator licence and daily driving exceeds four hours, drivers must keep written records on a weekly record sheet, unless a compliant tachograph is used instead. That is a duty on the operator and the driver, and it is not something a diary tool discharges.
If your business is mostly vehicle-based, the drivers hours record keeping page in our logistics section goes into the record side properly.
Where the qualification records bite #
There is a quieter version of this problem that only surfaces when something goes wrong. Scheduling by who is free, rather than by who is currently qualified, works right up until the day a ticket has lapsed and the job is a notifiable one.
The competence side of that is not administrative. But knowing which cards, registrations and scheme memberships expire when, and prompting before they do, is pure rules, and it is exactly the sort of list that lives on a wall calendar in a firm of eight people.
The same applies to what has to leave the job at the end of it. See electrical certificates and EICRs and building control notifications for the paperwork that attaches to specific work types.
What to measure before changing anything #
For two weeks, count the reschedules. Not the jobs, the reschedules. For each one, count how many people had to be told and how many calls or messages that took. Most firms are startled by the multiplier, and it is the multiplier rather than the volume of jobs that decides whether this is worth doing anything about. Our which tasks run on rules tool turns a count like that into hours.
Then the honest question is whether a better diary is the answer or whether the diary is fine and the notification around it is the failure. In our experience it is usually the second, and firms have been shopping for the first.