Every morning someone looks at a list of addresses and decides who goes where. That works with two vans. With more vehicles, time windows and jobs that arrive during the day, it gets hard to do well by hand.
The dispatcher prints the day's jobs or opens them in a spreadsheet and sorts them by area. The north side goes to one driver, the south side to another, and urgent jobs get squeezed in where they seem to fit. Routes go out as a text message or a list on a clipboard, and each driver decides the order of stops, usually with a map app on the dash.
With two vans and a short list, this is fine. It gets harder when jobs have time windows, when some stops need a particular vehicle or skill, and when new work comes in after the trucks have left. Past a few constraints the dispatcher has to guess, and on a map the guesses look like zigzags.
One driver crosses the same bridge twice and finishes on overtime. Another finishes early and drives back to the yard with nothing to do that afternoon. Fuel costs creep up slowly enough that nobody ties them to the way routes are planned.
Customers are told "sometime between eight and noon" because the office doesn't know any better. They call to ask where the technician is, the office calls the driver, and the driver answers while driving. That call happens many times a day.
Routing software takes the day's stops and puts them in order. It weighs the drive between stops against how long each job takes and the windows customers were promised, and it knows which vehicle carries which equipment and which driver can do which work. You get one route per driver at the click of a button, about what a patient dispatcher could build with a big map and a free afternoon.
Each driver gets their route on their phone, in order, with addresses and job notes, and can open turn-by-turn directions from any stop. When they mark a stop done, the office sees it.
Owners are often surprised by the effect on customers. Because the system knows where each driver is in the route, it can send the customer an expected arrival time and a second message when the driver is on the way. Most of the calls asking where the technician is stop, and customers wait at home for a shorter window.
When a job comes in at midday, the dispatcher adds it and the system suggests the route it fits with the least disruption. The dispatcher still makes the call, with the whole day on screen.
If you run one or two vehicles in a small area and the stops repeat week to week, a good dispatcher and a map app are enough, and we'll tell you so. Routing software pays off when you have a handful of vehicles on the road, stops that change daily, customers who expect a time, and a dispatcher who spends a good part of each morning building routes.
Also look at who plans the routes. If they only work when one particular person builds them, you have a problem on the day that person is out. Putting their rules into software covers that day.
Routing needs a reliable schedule and clean job data underneath it. If your jobs still live on a whiteboard and in a WhatsApp group, we'd automate the schedule first and add routing after.
If your mornings start with someone sorting addresses by hand, book a call and bring a typical day's job list. We'll tell you whether routing software is worth it at your size, and what it would take to automate.