What scheduling actually decides
- The date and time window a customer is promised.
- How long the job realistically takes, including setup and cleanup.
- Which skills or certifications the work requires.
- Whether the business has the capacity to keep that promise at all.
- What happens to the slot if the customer cancels or reschedules.
What dispatch actually decides
- Which technician or crew takes each appointment.
- The order stops are visited and the route between them.
- How emergencies and same-day work get inserted without breaking the day.
- Who absorbs an overrun when a job takes twice as long as planned.
- When the customer is told the technician is on the way.
The four inputs every appointment needs
An appointment that cannot be dispatched is not really scheduled. Four fields make it dispatchable: a realistic duration, a skill or job-type requirement, a location, and an arrival window the customer has actually agreed to.
When any of the four is missing, someone in the office fills the gap by memory. That works until the day the person holding the memory is out.
Where scheduling and dispatch break in practice
- Generic one-hour slots applied to jobs that range from 30 minutes to a full day.
- Travel treated as free, so the calendar looks full while the crew is on the road.
- Emergencies inserted verbally, leaving the calendar out of date by mid-morning.
- Reschedules that release the customer but never release the slot.
- Two people booking into the same technician from two different screens.