Ask any dispatcher what their evening looks like and you will hear a version of the same story: jobs on sticky notes, crews on a whiteboard, a phone glued to one ear, and a spreadsheet that never quite matches reality. The board gets built one job at a time, and it gets rebuilt every time something moves.
Where the time actually goes
The cost is not the scheduling itself. It is everything around it:
- Hand-typing slots. Dozens of jobs, each keyed in with times, crews and trucks.
- Chasing missing details. No phone number, an unvalidated address, a job that never got approved.
- Re-work. One crew calls out and the whole board reshuffles.
None of that is dispatch's fault. It is the tooling. When the schedule lives in a person's head and a whiteboard, only that person can build it — usually on overtime.
What auto-scheduling changes
Orbit builds the day from jobs that are already validated and approved. The dispatcher reviews a proposed board instead of typing one, adjusts the exceptions, and publishes. What used to take hours takes under a minute.
The goal was never to remove the dispatcher's judgment. It was to remove the typing, so their judgment is all that is left to give.
Assignments crews actually confirm
Publishing is only half the job — you still need to know the crew is coming. In Orbit, published assignments go out as a text. Crews reply YES to accept or NO to decline, and dispatch sees acceptance in real time, before the morning of the job rather than at 6am when nobody shows.
The result is a board that is faster to build, honest about who has confirmed, and rebuilt in seconds when something changes.