GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

The Garage Door Dispatch Board: Every Job by Day and by Van

Every garage door company has a dispatch board, even if it is a dry-erase board by the parts shelf with two columns marked “Mike” and “Van 2.” The board is where the day gets decided. The trouble with the whiteboard version is that only the person standing in front of it can see it, and the techs in the field only know what they were told at 7am.

From the Whiteboard to the Scheduled List

The big picture of how scheduling fits together is in Garage Door Scheduling Software: The Complete Guide to Scheduling and Dispatching a Garage Door Company. This article zooms in on the board itself.

In GarageDoorBossPro the dispatch board is the Scheduled List. It shows jobs by day, and it can be filtered by van. Pick today and every van and you see the whole company's day. Pick today and Van 1 and you see one tech's route in order. Pick next Wednesday and Van 2 and you see whether the install van has room for the door that customer just approved.

Nothing about it needs to be copied anywhere else. The tech's phone shows the same jobs, in the same order, from the same list.

What Each Job Shows

A dispatcher needs to know more than an address. On a garage door board, the useful details are the service and the door:

• The service. Torsion spring replacement, off-track repair, opener install, yearly tune-up, commercial dock door repair, whatever is on your own service list.
• The equipment. Because every property keeps its doors and hardware, the job carries details like “Garage Door · 16x7 · Insulated Steel · Bay 1” or an opener's HP and drive type.
• Access and notes. Keypad codes, “the left door is the problem,” “detached shop behind the house.”

That is enough to tell a twenty-minute sensor visit from a full afternoon, and to see that a job needs a tech who has done commercial rolling doors before. For more on using those details when deciding which van to send, see Dispatching With the Door on the Card: Equipment Details That Send the Right Van.

Filtering by Van

Employees are assigned to vans. That one setting is what makes the board useful for a garage door company, because the vans are usually doing different kinds of work. A common setup is one van on repairs and emergency spring calls and another on installs and tune-ups. Filtering the board by van lets the office look at each route on its own terms.

The repair van's day is short jobs that shift around. The install van's day is one or two big blocks. Looking at them separately makes it obvious which one can absorb another call and which one is already full.

Moving Jobs Between Vans and Days

The point of a board is that things move. A customer calls to push a tune-up to Friday. The install van finishes early and can take two repair calls on its way back. A spring call comes in from across town and the repair van is twenty minutes the wrong way.

Each of these is a change to the job's day or van on the board. Once it is moved, the job is on the right tech's phone and off the other one. There is no “did you get my text” step, and nobody has to rewrite a column on the whiteboard.

Once jobs are on a van, the next question is order. Auto-routing and manual route order are covered in the next two articles in this series.

Looking Ahead, Not Just at Today

The whiteboard only holds today. The Scheduled List holds any day. That matters most for installs, which are booked out, and for tune-ups, which are planned in batches. Before promising a homeowner “we can put your new door in Thursday,” the office can open Thursday for the install van and see what is already there.

It also matters for planning around the repair van. If next Monday already has a full slate of tune-ups on the repair van, that is a sign to move a few to the install van and keep the repair van open for the calls that will come in on their own.

One Board, Every Device

The board runs in the browser, so the owner can check it from home before the shop opens, the office can work it all day, and a tech can glance at their own route on the phone. When the owner moves a job from his kitchen table at 6:30, the tech sees it before starting the van.

Saved views make the board faster to open the same way every morning, and crew GPS on the office map adds where the vans actually are. Both get their own guides later in this series.

Getting Off the Whiteboard

Moving the board into software usually takes a week of running both side by side, then the whiteboard quietly stops getting updated. Bring customers in by CSV import, and imported addresses are placed on the map automatically. Add vans and techs with their PINs. Put tomorrow's jobs on the Scheduled List instead of the whiteboard, and let the techs see them on the phone.

To see how the board connects to routing, the Waiting List and customer texts, visit the garage door scheduling software page.