DISPATCH MANAGER

A SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT STORY

Today is Thursday, August 27, 2009 and for the last 5 to 6 years I have been engage in the service of my existing client base. I have a great many clients on annual support and I have not had much need to sell new installations for two reasons. The first being that my current clients keep me very busy with their needs and requirements and second it is very difficult to sell accounting programs with competitors around like Quick Books and Peach Tree Software. But Dispatch Manager has changed the rules.

I was first approached by Steve Bez from MasterCraft Heating and Cooling about three years ago. I meet Steve at one of my clients, O’Brien Waterford Contractors in Waterford Michigan. Steve new that he had a problem with keeping track of customer information and he desperately wanted to find software that could do the job that his office staff was not doing. I had a another client in a similar situation that had designed and implemented his own custom program that I thought might help. My other client and I meet with Steve and subsequently Steve purchased my clients Customer Management Software.

In the spring of 2007, Steve asked me to help out more directly. After a few on site visits to his office it was painfully obvious that the program that I had sold to him was not working. Steve’s office situation was in great turmoil. The staff was constantly at odds with each other. There was screaming, swearing and general disarray because nobody really understood their job or what was required of them, it was very unsettling.

My initial job was to inject order into the chaos which I did by writing an office operations manual. Once people knew what their job entailed, what was required of them and what there responsibilities were the noise level receded long enough to realize that the software I had sold them was the wrong one for the job. Their business was oriented around the customer this much was obvious. But they needed instant access to equipment records, site information, warranty data, customer address, location and contact information at each desk where the person taking the phone call was sitting. The current system that I had sold them was organized around the dispatch record not the customer record.

In addition to this, the single most import feature of their office was the dispatch board. This board was maintained by the owners of the company, Steve and Jack. Dispatch calls taken throughout the day were recorded on 3 by 5 index cards of various colors by the phone operators. White for installations, green for warranty work, red for maintenance, and so on. Once the cards were created they were pinned to a large cork board that was the focal point of the business. This board was called “The Dispatch Board”.

This board was very  large. It had a number of columns each representing a particular technician. The rows of this board were essentially times. Starting with the first call of the day for that technician and going down to the last call of the day. People milled around the board in the morning receiving their days job assignments, the owners shifted the work load around by removing the index cards from one service technician and pinning them up under another service technician.

This technique might have served its purpose when there were only two or three technicians and maybe one or two installation crews, but MasterCraft Heating and Cooling had 19 trucks to schedule, three telephone operators and many other individuals that needed to deal with the days schedule. Cards being prepared by the phone operators often ended up on the floor or under someone’s cup of coffee. Hand written work orders where everywhere. They covered all open desktops at least two inches thick. Sometimes they even made it to the customer files never to be seen again.

Needless to say pandemonium reined supreme. It was a difficult situation at best.

It became obvious to me that any new software program was going to have to deal with the dispatch board first. We had to convert that board to an electronic version that anyone with a computer terminal could access. Along with this task it was apparent the entire database had to be oriented along the customer chain not the dispatch record chain. The result was Dispatch Manager.

If you could have seen MasterCraft Heating and Cooling a year ago and then today you would be amazed. The office is quite, focused and oriented around the workstations. Nobody needs to leave their desk because all of the information they need is at their finger tips and they all share the same stuff, customer data, equipment information and dispatch  records. The owners can move the schedule around at will and everybody sees the results as if they were standing behind them at the old dispatch board.

Dispatch Manager program can schedule and track service calls for any number of trucks or individuals by the hour and by the day. It is designed so that my clients telephone operators and dispatch manager can easily take and schedule service calls while still on the phone. They can instantly review customer information such as what equipment has been installed, does this client have a maintenance contract and what warranty information should I be aware of.

The new MasterCraft Heating and Cooling can handle 10 times the volume with less office staff more accurately and with greater effect. The change is really something to see. A change that was created by the Dispatch Manager program.

Thomas A Persha