Drive time is the most expensive hour a service company pays for: the technician is on the clock, the truck burns fuel, and nobody is billing. You won’t get it to zero, but most of it is decided before the day starts — by how you book, not by how the technician drives.
This is a practical route planning guide for field service teams, followed by an honest note on what Exoserva’s route tools do today.
1. Plan routes when you book, not the night before
The cheapest route fix is at the moment you offer a time slot. When a customer in the north part of your area calls, offer them the windows when a technician is already booked nearby, not the first free slot on the calendar. A route planner can’t undo a day booked north–south–north.
2. Divide your area into zones
Split your service area into a few zones your team recognizes — by city, highway or zip code — and give each zone preferred days or a primary technician. Zones make booking decisions fast (“north side is Tuesday and Thursday”) and keep trucks from crossing the whole area for one call.
3. Start the day from where the technician is
If technicians take trucks home, the first job should be close to home and the last one close to where they’ll finish. Routing everyone from the shop when half the team never goes there adds a commute to every morning.
4. Respect appointment windows first, distance second
A perfectly short route that makes you late for a promised 8–10 AM window isn’t a better route. Build the day in this order:
- Fixed appointment windows and emergencies.
- Flexible jobs, grouped by zone around them.
- Buffer time between jobs for parts runs, overruns and traffic.
5. Keep the right parts on the truck
A second trip for a part is the most avoidable drive of the day. Review tomorrow’s jobs the evening before and stock the truck for them — especially for repeat equipment types.
6. Measure one number
Pick a simple weekly metric: jobs completed per technician per day, or total miles per job. If it improves after you introduce zones, your routing is working. If it doesn’t, look at how jobs are being booked before blaming the drivers.
What Exoserva does today
I want to be clear about where our route tools are, so you can plan with the right expectations:
- Suggested stop order: in Dispatch, select a technician, switch the header to AI and open Route Optimization (it shortens to Routes on a narrow screen). You’ll see a suggested order for that technician’s jobs for the day, with estimated minutes, miles and fuel saved compared with the current order. An admin turns it on in AI Hub → Automations → Route optimization. Fuel price and vehicle MPG can’t be set there — the saving is calculated from fixed defaults of $4.50 a gallon and 20 MPG, so treat the dollar figure as illustrative.
- It’s a preview, not a re-schedule. The suggestion doesn’t move any appointments. If you want to use it, reschedule the jobs on the Schedule board — after checking with the customers.
- Its limits right now: it never moves your appointments, and it ignores the windows you promised customers. Distances fall back to a straight line at about 30 mph, though with the default traffic setting on it reuses cached traffic distances where it has them. The order starts from the first job in the list — with the default “prioritize urgent” setting that’s the day’s highest-priority job, not wherever the technician actually is. Use it as a sanity check on an obviously zig-zagging day, not as the final plan.
- Service territories can be set up under Operations → Territories to document your zones. Automatic technician assignment doesn’t use them yet.
- Truck stock: Inventory has a Van Inventory tab for tracking what each truck carries.
I’ll update this post as these tools improve.
How do you split your service area — by zip codes, cities, or just “north and south”? And do your techs start from the shop or from home?