Scheduling

Route-based work looks simple from outside. The same customers, on a schedule, forever. Which is exactly why it goes wrong: nothing about it is urgent, so nothing about it gets attention until a customer notices you skipped them. Filters, linen, uniforms, pool chemicals, pest treatments, grease traps. The business model is a promise to show up on a cycle. The operational problem is that the cycle lives in a spreadsheet somebody maintains, or in one person’s head, and both degrade. ...

Your schedule is right at 7am. By 10am it is fiction. The first job needed a part nobody knew about. The tech who was supposed to be at the second site is still at the first. The customer at the third site has taken the afternoon off work and is waiting. Nobody has called her, because the person who would call her is the person now solving the parts problem. ...