2 · Dispatcher — scheduling, routing, the map

The dispatcher decides who does what, when, and in what order to drive. PLANA Field Service gives them three connected tools: the dispatch board, day routes with one-click optimisation, and a live map.

Dispatch board

Field Service ▸ Operations ▸ Dispatch Board is a timeline grouped into technician lanes, with each order shown as a time bar coloured by its stage.

• Drag a bar onto another technician's lane → reassign the job.
• Drag or resize along the time axis → reschedule it.
• Use the Day / Week / Month zoom at the top.

The colour of each bar tells you the stage at a glance — new, assigned, scheduled, en route, in progress, awaiting signature, completed.

When orders appear on the board

An order shows on the board once it has a Scheduled Start. Set one manually, or let Optimize Route (below) compute and write it for you.

Day routes and route optimisation

Field Service ▸ Operations ▸ Day Routes — a day route is one technician's stops for a single day.

1. Open or create a day route, set the Technician and Date, and add the Orders (optionally a Start/End Location — the depot).
2. Make sure each order's location is geolocated (Service Location ▸ Geolocate).
3. Click Optimize Route.

The routing engine computes the best stop order:

• OSRM provides real road travel times between every pair of stops.
• VROOM solves the vehicle-routing problem, using each job's expected duration (learned from the history of similar completed orders) and any time windows.
• The optimised sequence and ETAs are written back onto the orders.

The engine is self-hosted

The OSRM and VROOM services run inside the PLANA cluster — no third-party routing API, no per-request fees, and your addresses never leave the platform.

The route map

On the day route, click Show on Map:

• Numbered markers for each stop in optimised order, a depot marker, and the real road route drawn from OSRM.
• Click a marker → a popup with the ETA and a ▶ Navigate link that opens the phone's map app with turn-by-turn directions.

Each individual order also has a Navigate button for one-tap directions to that site.

Next: hand the job to the technician on their phone — see The mobile job →.