Home/What we build/Scheduling & dispatch
One board for who is going where, and when
Scheduling breaks in a specific way: the plan exists, and then it changes, and the change has to reach five people by phone. The plan on the wall and the plan in reality separate at about nine in the morning.
How it usually works today
- The schedule is a whiteboard, a printout, or a sheet that is emailed each evening.
- A change means a round of phone calls, and one person does not get it.
- Nobody can see where the work actually is right now.
- The same route gets rebuilt by hand every week.
What replaces it
- One schedule everybody sees, that updates when it changes.
- Recurring routes and appointments that repeat without being retyped.
- A record of what actually happened, not just what was planned.
- The office and the road looking at the same thing.
Routes that repeat, with exceptions that do not
A bus company running daily school routes plus charters, a same-day courier, a distributor with refrigerated delivery rounds — the base schedule is stable and the exceptions are the work. Software earns its place here by making the repeat free and the exception quick, rather than by trying to be clever about the routing itself.
Appointments with a physical constraint behind them
Gown fittings against a rotating rental inventory with cleaning and alteration turnaround; wig orders with measurements, deposits and reset appointments; dental recall across three offices. These look like calendars and are not — the appointment is only valid if the thing behind it is available, and that constraint is what a general-purpose calendar cannot hold.
The season problem
Several of these businesses do a large share of their year in a few weeks — a Passover production run, a simcha season, a camp intake. A system that is comfortable in February and falls over in Nisan has not solved anything. Designing for the peak rather than the average is usually the difference.
Tell us what your business runs on.
We start by drawing how the work actually moves through your business. That drawing is yours whether or not you build with us.
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