Workforce Management & The Return On Investment: Dispatching

Change on a single level of a workforce’s management can have effects that echo throughout the entirety of a business. As we examined last week, becoming a paperless entity can result in thousands of dollars saved. While enhancing the collection and recording of data can improve your overall processes, there remains another avenue by which you can improve your workforce: Dispatching.

If forms record customer data, dispatching is how your team gets to the customer in the first place. It is the spark that initiates the entire mobilization of your workforce. The effectiveness of your dispatch practices directly correlates to how many jobs your workforce can accomplish within a standard, eight-hour workday.

Let’s continue looking at Paul’s Pool Cleaning Company from last week:

We follow one of Paul’s employees through a standard, eight hour work day. The employee arrives at Paul’s headquarters, clocks in, and receives their orders for the entire day. At this point, they travel to their closest jobsite. The blue-shaded areas of the diagram indicate the time it takes for them to complete the job, while the white areas represent time they spend at headquarters or traveling to the next jobsite.

We can see that without dispatching, Paul’s employee completes five pool cleanings with three-and-a-half hours spent either traveling or at headquarters. If we assume each cleaning nets 100 dollars then we can also calculate how much revenue Paul’s Pool Cleaning Company is generating per employee.

$100/Pool
X     5
$500/Day

Operating under the assumption of twenty workdays a month, we can conclude that a single employee brings in $10,000 a month for Paul’s Pool Cleaning Company without dispatching. While a substantial haul, there are still three-and-a-half hours of the workday where the employee is neither completing a work order nor eating lunch.

We follow the same employee throughout his day. However, the effects of dispatching are indicated by the chart. The employee no longer has to go to headquarters to receive his work orders for the day and instead, heads directly to their first assignment where they clock in upon arrival. With travel time remaining consistent across both examples, Paul’s employee can accomplish one more job per day and clock out at the completion of that final job.

$100/Pool
X      6
$600/Day

With an additional job completed per day, this single employee is generating an additional $2,000 per month for Paul’s Pool Cleaning Company. Without changing hours of operation or adding anyone else to the payroll. Now, imagine the effect when considering multiple employees? Dispatching applied to five of Paul’s employees would result in $120,000 generated per year! Workforce management yields tangible returns; time is saved, processes are streamlined, and revenue is generated.

Sounds like all pluses, and no minuses, to me.

Join us next week as we explore “Workforce Management and the Return on Investment: Timekeeping.”

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