Dispatch & scheduling

See the week. See the workload. Make the call.

The question a dispatcher asks forty times a day is not “what is the optimal route”. It is who has room on Thursday — and most boards answer it by making you squint.

orientracompliance.ca/company/southside/board
Dispatch — week of 24 August
Southside Electric · Winnipeg branch
Week view
Committed
175 h
of 208 h schedulable
Open capacity
33 h
on the days they work
Overlaps
1
two jobs at once
Not on the board
4
unassigned or undated
Mon 24
Tue 25
Wed 26
Thu 27
Fri 28
Sofia OkonkwoJourneyperson · 32 h of 40 h
Quarterly formal inspection8:00 a.m. · Polo Park — East Wing
Freezer plant service call2:00 p.m. · Inkster Blvd
Site safety inspection9:30 a.m. · Maples Collegiate
4 h open
8 h open
High-bay replacement — 8 units10:30 a.m. · Inkster Blvd
3 h open
Panel schedule verification8:00 a.m. · Maples Collegiate
4 h open
Liam BeckerService technician · 24 h of 32 h
Emergency lighting test7:30 a.m. · Seven Oaks
4 h open
Away — vacation
Away — vacation
Away — vacation
Receptacle circuit dead — office 21012:30 p.m. · Maples Collegiate
Install crew AOkonkwo + Nguyen · shared
Rooftop unit change-out8:00 a.m. · 8 h · crane booked
8 h open
8 h open
Capacity is arithmetic you can check. Capacity is the length of the working day on a day they work, committed is the scheduled minutes already on them, open is the subtraction. A day somebody is away has no capacity, and says why.

Every number on the board is arithmetic you can check

Capacity

How long this person’s working day is, on a day your company works. Configuration — with a per-person override for a part-timer or an apprentice on four days.

Committed

The scheduled minutes of the jobs already on them that day. On a crew job, each person on the roster carries the time — not just the lead.

Open

Capacity minus committed. A day nobody works has no capacity, and says so rather than showing eight hours of imaginary room.

Over

Committed beyond capacity, shown as over-capacity rather than hidden. Overbooking is information, not an error to be silently corrected.

Overlaps

Two jobs at once are reported and left alone. Sometimes that is exactly right — a quick call inside a long install — and only the dispatcher knows which.

Away

Somebody on holiday has no capacity, and the day says Away — vacation. A person who is off should never look like the emptiest person on the board.

Orientra informs the dispatcher. It doesn’t pretend an algorithm knows your business better than you do.

There is no travel-time estimate, no route optimisation and no suggested assignment, because a bad version of any of those is worse than the whiteboard it replaced. When Orientra has something genuinely useful to say, it will say it — and until then it will not invent one.

When Safety is enabled

Competency context, at the moment of assignment

If you run both products, the dispatcher sees what Orientra knows about each technician’s competency for the work in front of them — before the truck rolls, not after.

Every technician stays listed and assignable. Those with a competency note are ranked lower and carry the reason. Orientra only prevents an assignment where you have deliberately configured that requirement to block.

How competency works

Rescheduling is not a status change. A job can move to a different time without moving through its lifecycle, and moving it never quietly pushes out the response time you promised the customer.

Unplaced work belongs on this screen. The whole point of looking at the week is deciding where the work that has not been scheduled yet is going to go.

Branch and division scoping. A dispatcher in one branch reads their own board, not every board in the company.

See the dispatch board with your own week on it.

Start a 45-day free trial with your own company — no card required — or book a demonstration focused on the workflows that matter to you.