Answered

Technician Hours on Dispatch

 Not sure if anyone else out there operates the way we do, but going to throw this question out there.  We almost NEVER have set times for jobs.  The issue we are having is we may set a dispatch time of 2pm, but the technician may accept the dispatch and start traveling to the job at 1pm.  The system is then showing negative travel hours which is skewing our technician time reports.  Does anyone have a solution to this issue (other than Desco's suggestion to edit EVERY dispatch time)?  Thanks in advance!

0

Comments

4 comments
  • Terri,

    Does this skew your travel time or just response time?  I found on our tech reports that the travel time is still a positive number but the response time would be negative.  We don't use the response time for anything so we kind of ignore it.  Hope this helps.  We are on version 15.

    Adam

    0
    Comment actions Permalink
  • Terri,

    Going to a job early should not give you negative travel time.  It will, however, give you a negative response time, which is generally a good thing.

    If you don't want to see a negative response time, have the person entering the dispatch set the time to the current time instead of the default of 1 hour in the future.

    You can do this automatically by going to your System Setup>dispatch tab and set the Default Lead Time to 0.

    Hope this helps.

    Rick

    0
    Comment actions Permalink
  • Thank you Adam and Rick for the responses!  We are extremely new with ESC.  I do not even know how we see reporting on response times.  I am looking at Technician Hours Reports and I frequently see negative travel times.  One particular dispatch, had a scheduled time of 2pm, the technician received the dispatch on his mobile at 9:30am and apparently opened it, accept it, whatever even though he wasn't going to it yet and it is showing -4:12 for travel time.

    0
    Comment actions Permalink
  • Ok, that's a training issue.  So, the tech really doesn't have to do anything to "accept" a dispatch.  It will appear on his/her mobile device and wait for them to actually act on it.  Generally this is to set themselves traveling, which shouldn't be done until they are actually on their way to that specific job.

    One of our major problems is getting the techs to put themselves on travel, working, and complete, promptly.  I don't let them adjust their own times, so if they forget they have to get with dispatch to correct times.

    Your dispatcher should, in all their spare time, keep an eye on the EDB for techs that are on their way to multiple jobs, working on multiple jobs, etc.  As with most database / scheduling software it's a lot easier to keep things current and correct than it is to go back and fix things after the fact.

    Of of the things I do periodically is look at the Tech Hours Report for negative travel times, and job times that exceed 12 hours.  The latter generally happens when a dispatch isn't closed properly, or is closed on a subsequent day and the person closing it forgets to update the date.

    0
    Comment actions Permalink

Please sign in to leave a comment.

Didn't find what you were looking for?

New post