ElectricalBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

Closest First Routing: Building an Electrician's Day Outward From the Shop

Once a van has its jobs for the day, somebody has to decide the order. On a whiteboard, that usually means the dispatcher eyeballs the addresses and writes numbers next to them. It works, mostly, until the day has twelve stops spread across two towns and the tech spends an hour backtracking.

From the Board to the Route

The board itself is covered in The Electrical Dispatch Board: Every Job by Day and by Van. Once jobs are on a van for a day, ElectricalBossPro can put them in order for you with one click. There are two auto-route options: Closest First and Furthest First. Both measure from the shop. This guide covers Closest First.

What Closest First Does

Closest First starts the van's day at the stop nearest the shop and works outward from there. The first call is a short drive. Each stop after it leads toward the edge of the territory. By the end of the day, the tech is at the far end of the route.

The order shows up on the board and on the tech's phone in the tech app. The tech does not need to know how it was built. They open the app, see stop one, tap the navigation button and go.

When Closest First Makes Sense

Closest First fits days when getting started fast matters more than where the tech ends up:

• Busy service days. When the phone is likely to ring with same-day calls, an early start near the shop gets the first few calls done quickly, which leaves room to fit new ones in.
• Material pickups. If the tech often comes back to the shop mid-morning for a part or a fixture, keeping the early stops close keeps that run short.
• Early customers. Customers near the shop who asked for a morning slot get it naturally.
• Techs who live out past the far end. If the tech's drive home is beyond the far edge of the route, finishing out there is a bonus.

When It Doesn't

Closest First can leave a tech at the far edge of the territory at 4pm with an hour-long drive back to the shop. If the van has to be back for a 5pm restock or the tech lives near the shop, that last drive is wasted time. On those days, Furthest First Routing: Driving Out Early and Working Back Toward the Shop is usually the better choice.

It also does not know about the things only the office knows: a customer who must be first, a commercial account that has to be done before the store opens, or an install that needs the whole morning. Those are reasons to adjust the order by hand after auto-routing, which is the next guide in the series.

Closest First on Install and Maintenance Vans

Auto-routing earns the most on service days with many stops. An install van with one panel upgrade does not need a route. But a maintenance van with four or five yearly generator maintenance visits, or a day of safety inspections pulled from the Waiting List, benefits just as much as a service van does.

For those days, the best routing starts before you click the button. On the Waiting List map, pick a group of due visits that sit near each other, assign them to the same van and day, and then auto-route. Closest First will run them in a tidy line out from the shop.

Re-Routing After a Change

Days change. A same-day call gets added at 10am, a customer cancels, or a job moves to tomorrow. After a change, the office can auto-route the van again to rebuild the order with the new set of stops. If some stops are already complete, think about where the tech is now before re-routing. Crew GPS on the office map shows where every van is, which helps decide whether to re-route the whole day or just slot the new call in by hand.

What the Customer Sees

Route order is not only for the tech. Customers with alerts turned on get a text when they are next and when the tech arrives, and the customer app shows a live map with their place in line: “You're stop 12 of 20 — the crew is 5 stops away.” A sensible route order means those messages are accurate, and the homeowner who took the morning off is not left waiting while the van crosses town twice.

One Click, Then Judgment

Closest First is a fast way to get a reasonable order on a busy service day. It takes a pile of addresses and turns them into a route in a click, which beats numbering stops on a whiteboard. The office still makes the final call. To see how auto-routing fits with the dispatch board, the Waiting List and customer texts, visit the ElectricalBossPro electrician scheduling software page.