How GreenLeaf Landscaping plans a full day of field jobs in twenty minutes

Company Overview

GreenLeaf Landscaping sends 28 technicians to around 150 customer sites a week. Dispatchers built each day's plan by hand from a whiteboard, a spreadsheet and a lot of phone calls.

Challenge

• Building the next day's plan took each dispatcher two to three hours every afternoon
• Skills and certifications were held in people's heads, so the wrong technician was occasionally sent
• A cancellation meant a technician's afternoon was simply lost, because rescheduling was too slow
• Technicians received the plan by phone in the morning, so nobody could see the day in advance

Solution

• Brightpath Flow assembles the day's plan from job type, required certification, location and technician availability
• Certification requirements are enforced by the workflow, so an unqualified visit cannot be scheduled
• Cancellations release the slot and offer the nearest suitable open job to that technician
• Technicians see tomorrow's plan the evening before, and changes reach them immediately

Results

• Daily planning fell from around two and a half hours per dispatcher to twenty minutes
• Repeat visits caused by sending the wrong skill set dropped by 60 percent
• Jobs completed per technician per week rose by just under 15 percent
• Dispatchers moved onto customer scheduling quality instead of plan assembly

Customer Testimonial

"Our dispatchers were extremely good at a job that should not have existed. They were solving the same puzzle by hand every afternoon. Handing the puzzle to Brightpath Software did not replace them, it gave them back the half of the day where they add real value."

Laura Kovács, Process Manager, GreenLeaf Landscaping

Key Benefits

• Day plans assembled automatically from real constraints
• Certification rules enforced at scheduling time
• Cancelled slots refilled with nearby jobs
• Technicians see the plan the evening before

Brightpath Software replaced GreenLeaf Landscaping's afternoon planning ritual with a twenty minute review, and put roughly 15 percent more jobs into the same week.