We're expanding our operations to cover three regions: Eastern, Central, and Mountain time. From an operational perspective, I want to ensure our dispatchers in each region aren't creating scheduling conflicts when coordinating cross-regional technician assignments.
Specifically, I'm trying to understand:
1. How FieldPulse handles time zone display — is it user-local, or tied to a company default?
2. When a dispatcher in Eastern time schedules a job for a technician in Mountain time, which time zone drives the calendar and notification timing?
3. Are there safeguards to prevent double-booking when the "same" time slot spans different actual hours across zones?
We've identified this as a potential friction point before our January rollout and want to establish clear protocols now rather than troubleshoot in production. Any guidance on current behavior or recommended configuration would be appreciated.
Pro tip from someone who's lived through this: we put the local time in the work order title. Not elegant, but it saved us more than once when dispatchers were looking at a board full of appointments and losing track of which tech was where.
"HVAC install — 7AM MT / 9AM ET" — something like that. Your technicians see their local time in notifications, but dispatchers need the mental anchor.
Another thing: if you're using customer notifications, double-check your templates. The default SMS doesn't include time zone, and customers absolutely notice when you say "technician arriving at 9:00" and they meant their 9:00, not yours.
Pro tip from someone who's lived through this: we put the local time in the work order title. Not elegant, but it saved us more than once when dispatchers were looking at a board full of appointments and losing track of which tech was where.
"HVAC install — 7AM MT / 9AM ET" — something like that. Your technicians see their local time in notifications, but dispatchers need the mental anchor.
Another thing: if you're using customer notifications, double-check your templates. The default SMS doesn't include time zone, and customers absolutely notice when you say "technician arriving at 9:00" and they meant their 9:00, not yours.
Josh, that's a pragmatic workaround I hadn't considered. The work order title convention is something we could implement immediately while we evaluate longer-term solutions.
Your point about customer notifications is particularly relevant — we're currently drafting our notification templates for the rollout. I'll flag this with the team configuring those.
