Real time service company scheduling systems are important during the heat of battle. You are racing against the clock to fit in all your customers both regular customers and call ins, while trying to squeeze in the emergency calls. Yes, I know exactly how it is. I founded the Car Wash Guys Franchise. Car Wash Guys.com

What we learned over the coarse of many years was that on the routes our crews would schedule work, then we would have 1-800 call ins thru an outsourced call center and later we added online ordering. You can imagine the conflicts with each crew doing some 6-20 stops per day and cleaning 60 cars and a couple of fleets in the order of 100 additional units to be cleaned.

We had regular customers and modification of schedules for rain days, 4-day work weeks or fewer particular days in a month for every other week customers or weekly customers who would not allow for more than 4 washes per month so they could average their own budgets. Can you say nightmare along with growing pains as we set up our units in 110 cities in 23 states? Yes that is what we thought.

Eventually we regionalized the call centers and synchronized the online orders and used PDA wireless devices and later got tricky taking payments in parking lots for on the spot jobs when the real-time scheduling system showed spaces, as our franchisees and their commission incentive truck managers did what ever it took to fill in those far and few between spaces in the schedule.

The Intranet system is a must for all small and regional route dispatched service companies. Originally a franchisee came up with the modification of the Intranet systems, hen he said;

I would love to be able to schedule manage our routes. Whenever we set up a regular account. . . add it to the calendar. If we get a page and have a one-off detail. . . add to the calendar; something that would be quick, easy, efficient. I would imagine it would mirror the Yahoo Calendar (http://calendar.yahoo.com/) You could log in and make changes as needed. You could get a view that could be a daily printout for the managers so they always have a list of appointments. and can keep their schedule tight.

Upon looking into this idea and figuring it all out, we produced it and it was quickly adopted and loved by our team. We did not do it exactly like this, however you can see the format. Eventually we had the system set up so that the franchisee or route drivers in multi-unit franchises could enter the amount of cars they got at each account and the system gave an average so when the teams did their daily printout the franchise owner or manager could have an idea of what to expect.

If numbers started decline, we were able to take action to remedy the situation, if they increased steadily we had heads up a HQ that we would need more trucks/units in our production pipeline (each service unit was custom built by our company).

Of course over the years we kept adding to the system to make it more robust and introduced a sales call tickler system with contact management software so teams could make so many sales calls per week while in the area. We became more efficient and crushed the competition into oblivion (in a nice way).

Our teams had trouble with all the sales and walk up inquires and some had glove boxes full of 50 different pieces of paper (all different sizes) with names and numbers all over the place at the end of a week and it got overwhelming. I hope Bill Gates is not reading this, as we have finally adopted his anti-form and anti-paper paperless officer theories now. Today all the personal contact managers are integrated and the system works fine. Think on this in 2006.