How do you balance route efficiency with technician skill matching?

Hi everyone! We've been using FieldPulse for about 6 months now and our dispatch team is running into this constant tension — we want to optimize routes to save time and fuel, but we also need to make sure the right tech with the right skills ends up on each job.

Right now we're kind of winging it, honestly. We have a spreadsheet of who is certified for what, and we cross-reference that with the schedule, but it's getting unwieldy as we grow. We went from 8 techs to 17 in just a few months!

How are y'all handling this? Are you using FieldPulse's skills/tags features? Do you prioritize proximity or expertise? And what do you do when your most skilled tech is 45 minutes away and someone closer could probably handle it but might take longer?

Would love to hear what's working for your teams! Thanks so much!

Parents
  • Practical answer: we optimized for route efficiency on 80% of jobs, skill matching on 20%.

    • Used FieldPulse's technician tags for base qualifications (HVAC, electrical, etc.)
    • Created a "complex" checkbox on job intake that triggers manual dispatch review
    • Everything else auto-assigns by zone

    Key was getting sales/onboarding to actually use the complex checkbox. Took some training but now it's habit.

    We also run a weekly report on drive time vs. job complexity to spot patterns. Takes 10 minutes and caught a bunch of inefficiencies we didn't see day-to-day.

Reply
  • Practical answer: we optimized for route efficiency on 80% of jobs, skill matching on 20%.

    • Used FieldPulse's technician tags for base qualifications (HVAC, electrical, etc.)
    • Created a "complex" checkbox on job intake that triggers manual dispatch review
    • Everything else auto-assigns by zone

    Key was getting sales/onboarding to actually use the complex checkbox. Took some training but now it's habit.

    We also run a weekly report on drive time vs. job complexity to spot patterns. Takes 10 minutes and caught a bunch of inefficiencies we didn't see day-to-day.

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