The dispatch console

The dispatch console is where you plan a day. It puts your jobs in a list, on a map and on a timeline at the same time, and lets you change a job without opening it. Open it from Dispatch in the top navigation.

The counts across the top are for the day you’re looking at: Total, Unassigned, Assigned, In Progress, Completed, and Failed and On Hold when there are any.

Choosing what you see

Three buttons switch the middle of the screen between Map & Schedule, Schedule on its own and Map on its own. The panels are draggable, so you can give the map or the timeline more room. The expand button next to the counts takes the console fullscreen; Exit Fullscreen brings the rest of the app back.

If you run more than one brand, the brand filter above the job list narrows everything to one of them.

The job list

Down the left, your jobs for the day in two groups: Unscheduled first, then Scheduled. Each card shows the job number, the job type, the customer, the time and who’s on it. A job that runs over several days says which day of the run this is.

Search matches the job number, title, customer, job type, address or the person on it. Sort orders the list by job number, start time, customer or priority. Filter narrows it to the statuses you tick.

Click a card and the job opens in the panel on the right.

The map

Pins are jobs, coloured and shaped by where they’ve got to: unassigned, assigned, in progress, complete, failed, on hold. The key sits under the map. Engineers who are sharing their location show as their own markers, so you can see who’s near what.

Click a pin to open that job. The buttons on the map let you fit everything on screen, switch between the street and satellite view, hide the labels, and draw the route an engineer took.

Jobs whose location hasn’t been placed on the map yet are counted in a line under it rather than dropped silently.

The timeline

One row per engineer, the day across the top, and a red line marking now. Scheduled jobs sit as blocks in their window.

Drag a block to another time or another engineer’s row to reschedule or reassign it.
Drag its edge to make the job longer or shorter.
Right-click a block for Reschedule, which offers Tomorrow (+1 day), +2 days, +1 week and Next Monday, and for Unschedule, which clears the time and takes everyone off the job.
Click an empty slot in someone’s row to start a new job at that time, or to put an existing unscheduled job there.

Completed, cancelled and failed jobs show a Completion locked marker and stay where they are. Time an engineer has booked out shows as a blocked-out stretch of their row, and hours outside the working day are shaded.

Team View groups the rows by team; Flat View lists everyone together. The arrows above the timeline move a day at a time, and Today brings you back.

A project shows as one block across its window with its progress on it. Jobs in its pool don’t get their own blocks; only ones pinned to their own time do. If the window has passed with work still open, the block says so, and the panel gives you a way straight to the ones left.

When a job may not fit

A job block with an amber ring may not fit where it sits. Hover over it and the tooltip lists why. There are five possible reasons:

Overlap: it runs into another job for the same engineer, and the tooltip says by how many minutes.
Outside working hours: part of it falls outside the engineer’s day. Working hours come from the engineer’s own hours, or from the Default Shift Start and Default Shift End in Auto-Assignment when they have none, read in the brand’s timezone.
During an absence: it overlaps time the engineer has booked out.
Too little travel time before or after: the gap to the neighbouring job is shorter than the drive between them.

Travel times on the board are estimates, worked out from the distance between the two jobs. The job panel shows one fit panel for the job and uses real drive times where it has them; where it doesn’t, it labels the figure as an estimate. When several engineers are on a job, the panel names the engineer each warning is about.

Fit warnings never stop you. You can still drop, resize or save a job that is ringed. When you drop an unscheduled job onto the timeline, it takes the length of its job type’s estimated duration, or 2 hours if the job type has none.

Early-finish suggestions

When an engineer finishes early, the board can suggest what to give them next. See Early-finish suggestions.

The job panel

Selecting a job opens a panel on the right with its job type, customer, time, address, notes, status notes, attachment count and verification code. The buttons that move it on, Complete, On Hold, Rebook and the rest, are here too.

The edit button turns the panel’s fields into editable ones; Save applies them and Cancel puts them back. While you’re editing, the panel warns you when the time you’ve picked clashes with something else that engineer is doing, or falls outside their working hours. Neither warning stops you saving.

View Full Details opens the job page, which has everything the panel leaves out.

Live updates

The console keeps itself current. When an engineer sets off, arrives or finishes, when someone else reschedules a job, or when a location comes in, the board redraws and the row that changed is highlighted for a moment.

If a day has more work on it than the board can draw, a message says so and asks you to filter by brand or narrow the day.

Who can use it

Dispatch needs the Operator, Operations Manager, Brand Administrator or Tenant Admin role. Rescheduling a job whose schedule is locked additionally needs the Operations Manager, Brand Administrator or Tenant Admin role.

What’s next

Early-finish suggestions: filling the gap when an engineer finishes early
Assigning resources: who ends up on the job
Statuses and workflow: what each status means