A diary full of crossings out, and a customer asking 'when?'
Your diary, whether it is a desk diary, a whiteboard in the yard office or your phone's calendar, is full of jobs: drilling for three customers, spraying for five, cultivations, hedge trimming, and a silage cut for a dairy farm that wants to go as soon as the grass is right. Each job is a customer, a set of fields and an operation.
Then it rains for three days. The ground on the clay farm will not carry the drill for a week, while the light land two miles away is fine by Thursday. The dairy farm rings to say the grass is ready. Every job has to be reshuffled, and the reshuffling happens in your head, then on the phone, then in the diary with a pen, which by now has more crossings out than entries.
Why a diary cannot hold a contractor's work
A diary is organised by day. A contractor's work is organised by customer, field and operation, and the day it happens is the last thing decided.
| What decides when a job happens | Where you keep it now |
|---|---|
| Weather and ground conditions | Forecast apps and your own judgement |
| Crop readiness | The customer's phone call |
| Customer priority and timing windows | Memory, or notes in the diary margin |
| Which operator and machine are free | The whiteboard, or your head |
| Distance between farms | Your knowledge of the area |
So the list of booked work lives in one place, the plan in another, and the constraints in your head. When the weather changes, the whole thing has to be rebuilt, and a job that was booked by phone in March and never written down properly is the one that gets forgotten.
What losing track of bookings costs
A forgotten or late job costs a contracting business more than the job. Farmers remember when a contractor let them down in a tight window, and they tell their neighbours. Customers ringing to ask 'when are you coming?' take up time, and you do not always have a straight answer.
The re-planning is a cost in itself. Every rain spell means an evening of phone calls, and the busiest weeks of the year are the ones where you have least time to do it well. Jobs drift out of order, operators are sent across the county and back, and small jobs for good customers slip behind bigger ones.
A job board for booked field work
What we build is a job board that holds every booked job as a separate item, with everything that decides when it can happen.
- Each job is a customer, a set of fields (from their field list or map), an operation and any details, such as seed, rate or timing window. Jobs are added from the phone while you are still talking to the customer, or from an enquiry form or email.
- Each field can carry notes on soil type or ground conditions, so the land that goes first after rain is easy to pick out.
- Jobs are grouped by operation and area. The board shows all waiting drilling jobs, for example, on a map, with priority and timing windows.
- Re-planning is drag and drop: pick jobs from the board into days and operators. Moved jobs keep their notes and history.
- When a job is scheduled or moved, the customer can be sent a text, if you choose, so they know roughly when to expect you.
- Jobs that are close to or past their timing window, and jobs waiting longest, are highlighted each morning.
Operators see their own day on their phone. When the plan changes, it changes on their screen too.
After the rain
It stops raining on Tuesday. On Tuesday evening you open the job board, filter to drilling, and see twelve jobs on the map. You pick the light land farms for Thursday and Friday, move the clay farm's jobs to next week with a note, and slot the dairy farm's silage in for Saturday. The customers whose jobs moved get a text. The operators see their days.
When a customer rings on Wednesday asking where they are in the queue, you can tell them, because you can see it.
Is your booking diary like this?
- Every spell of rain means an evening re-planning on the phone.
- Jobs are booked verbally and sometimes not written down.
- Customers ring to ask when you are coming and you are not sure.
- Your diary has more crossings out than entries by May.
- You have forgotten or badly delayed a job for a good customer.