Part 3 — Run Your Operation · Chapter 16

Scheduling & Dispatch

Dispatch is two separate decisions, and BigWave keeps them distinct. When does the job happen, which is a schedule entry on the work order. Who does it, which is an assignment of a technician, or of an assignable asset like a bucket truck, to that entry. Keeping them apart is what lets you schedule a job for Tuesday before you know which tech has Tuesday free.

A vocabulary reminder from the welcome chapter. None of this is asset scheduling. The engine that generates recurring maintenance work orders by itself is chapter 20. This chapter is people and calendars.

Schedule entries

On a work order, Schedule and Assign holds the job’s schedule entries. An entry carries its dates and times, and BigWave distinguishes scheduled start and end from actual start and end, so slippage is data rather than memory. A job can have several entries. The two-visit panel upgrade is one work order with two schedule entries, exactly as chapter 15 promised.

Date entry accepts specific dates and times or looser arrangements, depending on how the project schedules. Some work is “Tuesday 9:00” and some is “the week of the 14th”. Projects can also schedule at finer grain, breaking a work order into activities and tasks with entries at each level. Most service companies stay at the work-order level. Rollouts sometimes go finer. The scheduling level is a project option, chapter 9.

Assignments

Onto a schedule entry you assign resources: your technicians, partner technicians, or assets whose type is marked assignable, like the bucket truck. The assignment is what lands the job in the tech’s My Assignments, puts it on their connected Google Calendar, and fires the assignment alert if the project defines one.

Assignments can require confirmation from the assignee, and the project’s reporting tracks who has confirmed against who hasn’t, in the Waiting For Confirmation view from chapter 23. For partner techs especially, assigned and acknowledged are usefully different facts.

The resource calendar

Home page, Global, Resource Calendar is the dispatch board. Resources down the side, time across, every assignment visible, conflicts obvious. Drag to reschedule and reassign. Out-of-office from chapter 6 and the company holiday schedule from chapter 5 shade out unavailable time, so the calendar refuses the mistakes a whiteboard permits.

Admins can set calendar defaults, and there’s a shared monitor view built to be left running on a wall display in the office. The day’s board, always current, nobody poking at it.

Scheduled events

The calendar answers “what is each person doing”. Scheduled Events, under Home/Global, answers “what is happening”: a grid of upcoming scheduled work, filterable and viewable like any chapter 3 grid. Each project also carries its own Scheduled Events report, plus Missed Schedule Dates for entries whose window passed without completion. Those two, with the schedule alerts from chapter 13, close the loop on slippage.

Priya’s day

Commercial (Harbor Grill): the twelve inspection work orders, bulk-created in chapter 22, each need a visit inside the contract window. Priya filters Scheduled Events by the project monthly, schedules the unscheduled, and lets the missed-date alert catch anything that slips. Confirmation is on for the two partner techs she sometimes uses.

Residential (the Okafors): phone rings, Priya creates the work order from the customer record, adds a schedule entry for Thursday morning while the customer is still on the line, and drops Tom on it from the calendar view where she can see Thursday. Elapsed time: the length of the phone call.

Habits

  1. Schedule at creation whenever the date is known. Unscheduled work orders are invisible to every calendar-based safety net.
  2. Record actual starts and ends, or lose slippage reporting.
  3. Run dispatch from the calendar, not from memory. The calendar knows about vacations and double-bookings.
  4. Turn on confirmation for anyone whose acknowledgment you’d otherwise chase by text.
  5. Check Missed Schedule Dates weekly per active project. It should be empty, and knowing it’s empty is the point.