The dispatch board

Assigning work by dragging it onto a technician, with every check shown before you commit.

Where the day gets allocated. Jobs in columns, technicians in a rail, and a drag between them.

Two modes over one set of jobs

• Board — a kanban of where every job has got to.
• Map — where everything actually is.

The technician rail stays on the right in both, because it is what the board is for. On the map, the pins are drop targets too, so the same gesture works either way.

The columns

The columns come from your organisation’s state model, not from a fixed list. Travelling states get the travel column; anything in the on-hold category gets the waiting column. Rename EN_ROUTE and the column keeps working.

The summary line

Jobs on the board, how many are unassigned, how many are past due, and how many are short of something — that last one is the readiness check, aggregated. A job card carries a warning and a count when it is short.

The technician rail

Each technician shows:

• Whether they are available right now — from the roster, shifts, windows and leave together.
• Their load — jobs on today against capacity.
• What they are on now, and what is next.

Dropping a job does not assign it

This is the important part. Drag a job onto somebody and the board asks what would happen, then shows you:

Check	What you are told
Travel	Distance, driving time, and what time they would arrive
Service level	Whether both the response and resolution promises still hold
Skills	Whether they hold what the job requires
Certification	Whether theirs is current — an expired ticket is a stop
Parts	Whether the parts are in stock at the right store
Tools	Whether the instruments are free, usable and in calibration
Double booking	Whether this clashes with something already on them
Workload	What this does to their day
Site calendar	Whether the site is working then

Then you decide.

A board that assigned on drop would be a board people are frightened to touch, and every check it silently passed would be one nobody was shown. The preview is the feature.

Assigning anyway

Checks are advice, not locks. You can assign over a warning — sometimes the part is arriving at ten and the job starts at eleven. What the board guarantees is that you were told.

Picking a job up

On a touchscreen, tap a job to pick it up and tap a technician to drop it. The same preview appears.

Unassigning

Drag a job off a technician, or use Unassign on the job itself. It returns to the unassigned column.

What this screen is not

Dispatch is today. For whether the week fits — technician hours against what is due — use the capacity plan. The two are deliberately separate: the plan says whether the week can absorb the load, the board says who is on what right now.