A day that is half driving
Your engineer starts at home in one town, services two lifts in a city centre, drives an hour to a hospital for a repair booked weeks ago, and ends the day forty miles away at a hotel whose goods lift is due. The next morning another engineer drives past that same hotel on the way to their first job. Neither knew about the other's route. The planner did their best with a map and a spreadsheet.
Then a breakdown arrives mid-morning and the whole plan is redone by phone, one engineer at a time.
Why hand planning struggles here
Lift work combines things that are hard to plan together by hand. Routine visits have windows rather than fixed dates. Repairs need specific engineers or a pair. Some sites only allow access at certain times, and some need a key collected from somewhere else first. Call-outs interrupt everything.
- Visit windows, fixed appointments and call-outs are held in different places.
- Access restrictions, such as office hours only or early morning for retail, are in notes.
- Skills vary, so not every engineer can take every lift or task.
- The planner cannot easily see where every engineer is and what is left today.
- Re-planning after a breakdown is done by phone and memory.
Road time is lost time
Hours spent driving are hours not spent on lifts, and they fall hardest on the engineers you can least spare. Poor routes also mean overdue visits, late arrivals at booked repairs and tired engineers on long days. The planner, meanwhile, spends a large part of every day building and rebuilding plans instead of looking ahead.
Route suggestions a planner can trust and change
We build a route planning tool that uses your own job data and suggests plans. The planner stays in charge.
- Each day's candidate work is gathered: lifts due in their window, booked repairs, and any open call-outs.
- Each item carries its constraints: access hours, required skills or pairs, expected duration and any key collection.
- A routing engine, using a mapping service such as Google Maps or an open routing service, suggests routes for each engineer that respect those constraints and reduce driving.
- The planner reviews the suggestion on a map and a list, drags jobs between engineers and locks anything that must not move.
- When a call-out arrives, the planner sees which engineers are nearest and have the right skills, and the tool suggests how to reshuffle the rest of their day.
- Released plans go to engineers' phones, and changes are pushed with a notification.
| Planning input | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Lifts due | Your visit schedule per lift |
| Booked repairs | Job management system |
| Access windows and keys | Site notes on the lift record |
| Engineer skills | A simple skills list per engineer |
| Live call-outs | Your call-out log |
The tool suggests. It does not dispatch on its own. Your planner knows things no system does, such as which customer needs a particular engineer.
A worked Tuesday
Take a normal Tuesday with four engineers. Overnight the tool has gathered eleven lifts due this week in the northern half of the patch, two booked repairs and a goods lift at a distribution warehouse that is only accessible before the morning shift change. It proposes that the engineer who lives nearest starts at the warehouse, then picks up three lifts on the same business park, and hands the city centre office lifts to a colleague who holds the building's induction.
At half ten an entrapment comes in at a retail unit. The planner sees that the engineer on the business park is twelve minutes away and has the right skills, accepts the suggestion to send them, and lets the tool push one of their remaining lifts into Thursday's plan, still inside its window. The engineer gets the change on their phone with the site notes. Nobody had to ring round.
What the planner's day becomes
Planning the week becomes reviewing and adjusting rather than building from scratch. Breakdowns are slotted in with the options on screen instead of five phone calls. Engineers see sensible routes with site notes attached, and more routine visits get done within their windows.
Owners also get a clearer view of where engineers are based relative to the work, which helps with decisions about where the next hire should live.
Does your planning look like this?
- Routes are planned by hand from a spreadsheet and map.
- Engineers regularly drive past lifts that are due.
- Access restrictions are kept in notes that the planner has to remember.
- Breakdowns mean re-planning by phone.
- Your planner spends most of the day planning rather than looking ahead.