Scheduling engineers when it lives in one head

Every installation and service firm has one person who knows everything. Who is going where tomorrow, what to take, which customer must not be rung before ten, and where the same part was replaced last year. Usually it is the owner.

While they are on the phone, it works better than any software. The trouble starts the day they are ill, away, or simply under a boiler and not picking up.

This is a risk, not an inefficiency

Scheduling from memory is fast, and firms defend it by saying that writing it down would slow them down. That holds until the first outage. Then you find out what exists nowhere:

• who is going where and at what time,
• what to take and what still has to be bought,
• what was done at that customer last time and what was promised,
• what happens to the other jobs when one of them moves,
• who holds which ticket or certificate.

A shared calendar will not carry this. A calendar handles a date, but not progress, materials and equipment history. That is why scheduling in a calendar always ends up as an add-on to somebody's memory rather than a replacement for it.

Four questions that show where you stand

Try answering them out loud:

• If nobody in the office picked up tomorrow morning, would the engineer know where to go?
• When a customer rings about a complaint, can you find in a minute who attended and what they did?
• If one installation moved by three days, how many others move with it, and do you know right now?
• How many things can only be learned by asking one particular person?

If two of those answers make you uncomfortable, this is not a software problem. It is that the work is not written down anywhere.

What to do next week, still without software

The cheapest step is to get one layer out of that head, not all of it:

• A week ahead schedule in one place every engineer can see.
• Three lines against each job: what is to be done, what is going with them, what you are waiting on from the customer.
• One sentence after each visit about what was done, a phone photo will do.
• A list of what is on order, so dates are not promised blind.

Run that for a month and you get two things: a firm that survives your week away, and an exact brief for software, because you will see what gets written down easily and what never does.

Where it stops being enough

Paper and a spreadsheet work until the schedule starts changing during the day. Moving one installation changes materials, people and other dates, and that is more than anybody can hold manually.

That is the point at which your own work plan pays off: a job holds its date, its people, its materials and the equipment history, the engineer sees it on a phone, and the customer gets a confirmation or a reminder automatically. It does not have to be a big system. It only has to cover the part that changes every day.

How we build it

In stages. The first stage takes one thing, usually the work plan with dates and jobs, at a fixed price known in advance, and it gets used straight away. The next stage comes once the first one fits.

Prices and scope are public, and you can click through the panel demos. If you want to hear whether it pays off in your firm, book a free call.