Travel between jobs is the biggest hidden cost in field service. Here is how small and mid-sized teams cut it with better dispatch, not expensive fleet software.
Every hour a technician spends driving between jobs is an hour you pay for and cannot invoice. In most field service businesses it is the single largest source of wasted capacity — and because it is spread across the day, nobody sees it the way they see an idle machine. Cut travel time and you fit more jobs into the same day with the same people, which is the cheapest capacity you will ever add.
When jobs are handed out over chat, they are assigned by who is free or who asked first — not by who is nearest. A technician finishes in one area, then gets sent across town while a colleague is dispatched back to where the first one just was. Nobody is doing anything wrong; the system just has no view of geography.
Route-optimisation suites built for national logistics fleets are overkill and overpriced for a team of technicians in one or two cities. What a small or mid-sized team needs is a dispatch board that knows where jobs and people are, and helps assign and sequence sensibly. That is a feature of good dispatch and route planning, not a separate six-figure system.
Pick one number: average jobs completed per technician per day. Track it for two weeks before changing how you dispatch, and two weeks after. If travel was your bottleneck, that number moves — and it is the clearest proof that better dispatch pays for itself.
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