Service dispatching that runs on your rules, not a new board.

Service dispatching is the work of assigning field technicians to incoming service jobs: who goes, in what order, with which part. The term covers HVAC dispatch, office-equipment service, and industrial equipment service — any operation where technicians roll with parts on a van.

Work order management is the life of a service job from request to close: intake, assignment, parts, sign-off. In most service organizations the work order still starts as an email or a phone call, typed into the system by hand. That conversion is where the hours go — and it is the first thing the encoded rules take over.

Scheduling decides when jobs happen and builds the calendar. Dispatching decides who takes which job as work actually arrives — against part availability, error codes, skill, and how far behind each technician already is. Scheduling is the plan; dispatching is triage against it.

Both, and they are different jobs. Technician scheduling builds the calendar — who is available, where, with which skills. Dispatch is triage against that calendar as work arrives: the encoded rules check skill, part on the truck, and current load before a job lands on a technician’s day.

Because dispatch usually routes by proximity alone. Part availability lives in an inventory system that counts every van as a warehouse — one dealer runs 374 of them — and the error code on the ticket is never checked against either. The assignment is made before anyone looks.

Yes. The rules that decide which tech gets which job can be encoded on top of the ERP and phone system you already run. Inbound calls and emails become validated work orders — right tech, right part — before a truck rolls, and the judgment calls route to a human exception queue. No migration, no new board for the team to learn.

First-time fix rate is the share of jobs resolved on the first visit. Dispatch drives it because the outcome is largely set at assignment: a technician sent without the right part or the error-code context cannot finish the job. Rules-checked dispatch — part, skill, load — moves the metric more than anything that happens after the truck rolls.