Appropriately, the day after I wrote about the usefulness of our radios, the server for all the job information went on the fritz for most of the day, crippling our dispatchers.
During the day, we have three to four dispatchers, some for cars and trucks, some for tractor-trailers. They have to figure out which drivers to give which jobs so that all the jobs get done, all the drivers stay busy, and nobody has to drive around a lot with an empty vehicle.
Of course, doing this successfully is totally dependent on the jobs we have that day, which is really just random. Airline dispatchers have a much easier time, since their flights are scheduled months in advance. Our dispatchers rely a bit more on luck. Sometimes they'll ask me to make my way towards a certain part of town, because they know from experience where most of our jobs originate. Although usually the cause is that I just completed a delivery in some out-of-the-way location.
I'm not sure what the dispatchers did while the server was acting up; when I stopped in the office, they had access to the jobs, but couldn't edit them to mark them as picked up or delivered. They printed them out on paper so I had all the information.
No comments:
Post a Comment