Dispatch Programs for HVAC: How to Integrate the Right One

Dispatching HVAC services is an unusual mix of routine and emergency. A driver/service technician might have a handful of planned stops for the day helping keep construction plans on track or performing routine maintenance on residential HVAC systems—and at the last minute a few stops get added for repairs and replacements that are the definition of urgent. 

The HVAC businesses that customers keep coming back to work with are the ones that strike this balance most effectively—and the ones that are most successful are those who strike the balance effectively without letting costs spiral out of control. 

This requires a lot of things, but mostly it requires the right technology for routing, scheduling, and dispatching technicians to the right job site at the right time. 

Like so many things in this industry, that can be easier said than done—but armed with the right knowledge, HVAC businesses of all shapes and sizes can level up their technology and position themselves for improved customer services and efficiency. Here’s how. 

Index:

• Challenges in HVAC Dispatching (and How the Right Program Can Help)
• How Does Dispatching Software for HVAC Work?
• Choosing the Right HVAC Dispatch App

Challenges in HVAC Dispatching (and How the Right Program Can Help)

When you work in an industry like HVAC, your plans need to be able to evolve quickly to respond to changing circumstances. When a long standing customer calls you with an emergency order, you can’t tell them to wait until next week—which means you need the ability to rapidly route and dispatch last minute orders. 

To make that happen, you need a few things:

• Visibility into your inventory and delivery capacity: Simply put, you need to be able to see which technicians are available, which vehicles have space for additional loads, and which parts are actually in stock. 
• Flexible, efficient routes: You can always stuff one more stop onto a route—but at a certain point it becomes a recipe for late deliveries and customers become disgruntled. It’s much better to be in a position where you can re-optimize a route as you add stops to it. 
• Fast route optimization: This is part and parcel with the flexibility we just discussed, but it’s crucial to be able to generate routes quickly. That means avoiding doing them by hand, and avoiding legacy solutions that require too long a time to run. 
• Streamlined routing and dispatching: Speed is key here. That means that the division between routing and dispatching needs to shrink—essentially, once you’ve finalized a route, the driver/technician should be automatically dispatched that route. 

This combination can help you change the footing of your dispatching operations from reactive to proactive. You can put yourself in a position to stay efficient no matter what happens over the course of the day or week. Compare this to dispatch programs for HVAC that run on pen and paper or legacy technology: there’s simply no way to achieve the same level of flexibility.

How Does Dispatching Software for HVAC Help Save Time and Money?

We talked above about the fact that the right dispatching software for HVAC can power smarter, more flexible processes that can help HVAC businesses get the right parts or services to the right sites at the right time. But how exactly do these processes contribute to time and cost savings?

Here are a few ways:

• Faster routing and dispatching: Simply put, time saved at the route planning stage is time you can spend on more strategic tasks. Learn how Pella/Gunton was able to accomplish exactly that with DispatchTrack >> Read the case study
• Reduced paperwork: Printing out route manifests and paper proof of delivery every day can really add up in terms of the amount of paperwork involved. When you cut out all that physical paper, you reduce costs and also hugely streamline your operations. 
• Increased productivity: This applies to both drivers and dispatchers. Drivers get more realistic routes and can therefore make more stops on a regular basis—while dispatchers can cut out irritating manual labor and instead focus on what’s important. 
• Reduced phone calls: When you can automatically dispatch drivers with both their daily routes and any new stops that have to be added, you save yourself the hassle of calling them while they’re on the road. This improves safety, obviously, but it also keeps the day’s deliveries and service moving and track.
• Fewer unplanned returns: Some returns are just a part of life when it comes to HVAC and similar industries. But the more easily you can keep your plans up to date and your drivers/technicians working on the right tasks, the more easily you can prevent damage, wastage, and the kinds of delivery exceptions that lead to expensive unplanned returns. 
• Faster time-to-revenue: When you’ve digitized the routing and dispatching portion of your delivery and service, you can more easily centralize your data and get the right information when you need it. This puts you in a position to rapidly identify the proof of delivery for any given order and send it to the customer—speeding up time-to-revenue via timely information and accurate documentation. 

Of course, to gain all of those benefits, you need to make sure you implement the right dispatch software for HVAC within your technology stack. 

Choosing the Right HVAC Dispatch App

The difference between the right dispatching software and wrong dispatching software might not always look gigantic from the outside—but when you dig into the details, there are crucial pieces of functionality that aren’t a given. 

You don’t want to invest in software that won’t make it easier for you to provide HVAC services and deliver parts in a cost-effective way. So how do you go about choosing the right application and getting it successfully implemented? 

For starters, you need to take a wide view and think about your entire technology stack. When evaluating dispatching software for HVAC, ask yourself how it will connect to your ERP, WMS, and other systems. Which systems will it replace, and which systems will it have to integrate closely with? 

At the same time, the capabilities themselves are critical. To reap the rewards that we discussed above, you want a complete last mile solution that can handle the delivery and service journey from end to end. That means route optimization, automated dispatching, customer communications, real-time delivery tracking, driver management via mobile app and proof of delivery—all within a system that’s highly connected, intuitive, and easy to use. 

For many businesses, this will represent an opportunity to streamline IT by replacing multiple overlapping solutions with one cohesive software platform. The result is that data is centralized and you can leverage your increased visibility to administer the last mile more efficiently. Your last mile platform acts as a single source of truth, which gives you the foundation you need to get to the right decision that much more quickly. 

Not all dispatch programs for HVAC are created equal. As you seek out a solution, pay careful attention to your potential vendors’ track records in terms of supporting their customers. The right partnership can go a long way towards helping HVAC distributors keep their customers happy and their costs down.