One Board, Not Four Versions of Tomorrow.
The schedule exists in a whiteboard, a shared calendar, a group chat and one person's head, and the four disagree by mid-morning. We build dispatch around the constraints that actually govern your work — certifications, equipment, travel, crew pairings — so the plan the office makes is the plan the field receives.
The Symptoms, Before the Diagnosis.
The schedule changes by phone
A cancellation, a breakdown or a callout gets handled in a series of calls, and the board never catches up. By afternoon nobody can say with confidence where everyone is.
The calendar does not know your constraints
A generic calendar will happily book a job that needs a ticketed operator to a crew without one, or two jobs to the same machine. The constraints live in the dispatcher's memory, which does not scale and does not take holidays.
Travel is invisible
Jobs are sequenced as if the province were a single address. Windshield time is the largest unbilled cost in a lot of Alberta service work and it rarely appears in the plan.
The field finds out last
Changes reach crews through whoever remembers to text them. The version of the day they are working from is the one they were told, not the one the office is looking at.
Scheduling & Dispatch Systems, in Scope.
Scope is set against your operation, not against this list — but this is the shape of a build in this line.
A board built on your constraints
Certifications, equipment, crew composition, service areas and travel encoded as real rules, so an impossible assignment is caught when it is made rather than at seven the next morning.
Dispatch to the field directly
Assignments, changes and job detail reaching crews on their phones from the same record the office edits, so there is one version of the day rather than a text-message relay.
Handling the day as it actually goes
Cancellations, callouts, breakdowns and overruns handled as first-class events, with the knock-on effects visible immediately rather than discovered later.
Capacity and utilisation you can see
What is committed, what is free, and where the week is over or under-booked — the view that turns scheduling from firefighting into planning.
We spend the first part of the engagement with the dispatcher, because that is where the real rules live. Almost every operation has constraints that nobody has written down — which two people should not be sent together, which machine cannot go on that street, which customer needs the same crew each time — and a scheduler that does not know them will be overridden within a week.
Then we build the field side and the office side against the same record. A dispatch tool where the crew's view can drift from the dispatcher's view is not a scheduling system; it is a second place to be wrong.
What It Looks Like When It Works.
One authoritative plan for the day that the office edits and the field reads, with the constraints enforced by the system instead of remembered by a person, and enough visibility to say yes or no to the next job honestly.
- We do not build route optimisation as a research project. Where sequencing and travel matter we use established routing services and tune them against your reality, rather than writing an optimiser from scratch.
- We do not replace a field service platform that already fits. Where one does, integrating with it is faster and cheaper, and we will say so.
- We do not automate the dispatcher out of the decision. The system enforces constraints and surfaces consequences; a person still runs the day.
Five systems → one
Kilt Contracting · live in production
A general contractor working across Edmonton and Calgary replaced an accumulated stack of spreadsheets, texts and memory with one operations platform, so job status, crew and site are readable from the same record by office, field and management. Client-reported.
Scheduling & Dispatch Systems, Answered.
Why Not Just Use a Shared Calendar?
Because a calendar does not know your constraints, cannot represent a crew and a machine and a certification at once, and has no opinion when you double-book. It works until the number of moving parts passes what the dispatcher can hold in their head — which is usually the point at which someone starts looking for software.
Can It Handle Emergency and Callout Work?
It has to, for most Alberta service operations. Unplanned work is not an exception to the schedule, it is a feature of it, so the system is built to absorb an urgent job and show you immediately what it displaces.
Will It Work With the Field App We Already Use?
Usually, and that is often the better answer. Where the field tool is genuinely working, we integrate with it and build only the dispatch layer that is missing rather than asking crews to change what they already know.
Start with the operation, not the software
Book a 30-Minute Call.
30 minutes. We map how work moves through your business today, show you where it leaks, and hand you a costed plan — whether you build it with us or not.
Edmonton, Alberta · No commitment · 587-937-6948
Where To Go Next.
Up a level
Operational Software
Jobs, customers, approvals and documents in one system you own.
More In This Series
Client & Customer Portals
Approvals, documents and job status customers can reach themselves.
Legacy System Modernization
Retiring the Access database and the spreadsheet stack, without stopping work.
Internal Tools & Admin Portals
The one internal screen that replaces a spreadsheet and three logins.
Custom Web Applications
Multi-user operational web apps on a current stack, integrated and owned by you.
Mobile Apps for Field Crews
Capture on site, work without signal, sync when it comes back.
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