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Scheduling for success
1 Aug, 2007 By: Charles Simon Landscape ManagementYou may think you have everything set the night before, but there are always snags the next morning that change the work, routes or schedules. A truck won't start. A mower has a flat. A trailer's brake lights don't work. A driver doesn't show.
 An abbreviated version of a very simple but effective spreadsheet that shows customers, the services they receive, when they receive them and the charges for each service. You must havea system to track the work. |
Whatever you call it — the morning madness or the 7 a.m. circus — congratulate yourself for getting your crews out and on the road each day.
Scheduling and routing for a landscape contractor is the process of getting the right work orders for the day on the clipboards and in the best order for each crew.
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Each morning brings unique routing and scheduling challenges. You visit different customers each day, but each job takes a different amount of time, some jobs require special equipment and some customers have special requests. All information must be considered and communicated to your drivers. Then, once you send the crews on their way, you try to keep them on schedule.
There's no substitute for being prepared the night before. Print or write out work orders in advance. We use a work order form for each job. Each evening we pick and choose from the pile of work orders to create the best route for each crew. Even though our mowing routes are set for the season, we still review the lists each day. For example, we will add a work order for a dead plant removal to the mowing crew that services that customer. Crews return their mowing work order forms and other work orders each evening with time-spent recorded. If there was a rain delay and some of the day's mowing is pushed to the next day, it's noted and the next day's schedule is adjusted. Every few weeks we check the actual routes by plotting them on MapPoint. The plotting is automatic with our passive GPS system and gives us an image of each truck's route. It's fast and easy and usually shows the crew is taking the best path.
 7 KEYS TO EFFICIENT |
If you are like us, you have almost the same mowing customers as last year. Additions to the route are easy. Every Monday it's the east side, Tuesday across the river and so on. The routes get tough when customers request service on a day the crews are not in their neighborhood, when they have special requests and when crews choose their own routes.
It takes discipline to keep your crews on track. We now tell our customers we will make special visits for additional work only on their regular day. This doesn't always work, but when it does, our scheduling is more efficient.
 A simple technique that works |
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