Sending the nearest available technician (montør) is easy to say, hard to do without data. Do you know who's free at 11? Do you know who's 8 km closer than your colleague thought? Route planning (ruteplanlegging) isn't a map problem — it's an information problem.

In short

  • Route planning for service and installation is about minimising driving and maximising billable time per technician per day.
  • The two most important variables are competence (can the technician do the job?) and position (does it make sense to send them there?).
  • Digital planning with a real-time overview increases capacity utilisation and reduces costly empty driving.
  • Automated optimisation (AI dispatch) can fill gaps and replan around urgent jobs without manual review.

What is route planning in a service business?

In logistics, route planning is about minimising the driving distance between a set of delivery points. In a service business the problem is more complex: each stop requires a specific type of competence, has a time requirement (the customer is home 9–12), and the urgent job can show up at 10 and wreck the whole plan.

Traditionally this is solved with an experienced dispatch coordinator who knows the area and the technicians. It works — but it doesn't scale, it's vulnerable when the coordinator is off, and it gives you no statistics on how much capacity was actually used.

The three variables that decide a good plan

1. Competence. Can this technician do this job? The plumber can't fix an electrical problem. Your system needs to know which certificates and skills each technician has.

2. Location. Where is the technician now, and what's the next job? Real-time GPS position replaces the phone call "who's nearest?". With vehicle data from ABAX you can see this without ringing anyone.

3. Time. The customer has a time requirement. The job takes an estimated X hours. Does the technician actually have time today, or is it better to book it for tomorrow?

Balancing these three in your head for five technicians and twenty jobs is entirely possible. For ten technicians and fifty jobs, it isn't.

Typical planning problems — and the solutions

Problem: Empty driving between jobs. Solution: The clustering principle — group jobs in the same geographic area on the same day. A dispatch map with all open jobs visualised makes this obvious in seconds.

Problem: The urgent job blows up the whole plan. Solution: Who has the most buffer? With real-time status you know who's almost done, who has a job that can be moved, and who's too far away. An AI-assisted suggestion turns this into a single keystroke instead of five phone calls.

Problem: The technician finishes earlier than planned — and has no next job. Solution: A visible gap overview and an automatic suggestion for the next job within a reasonable distance. Gaps are lost billable time.

Problem: The coordinator is off. Solution: The system shouldn't depend on one person's knowledge. Planning should live in the software, not in one person's head.

How to build an optimal day

A systematic approach in three steps:

Step 1: Put the right competence on the right job. Go through open work orders (arbeidsordre) and match them against available competence. Best done the evening before or early in the morning.

Step 2: Cluster jobs geographically. Show all of the day's jobs on a map. Move jobs between technicians so they form geographically coherent routes — not scattered criss-cross across the map.

Step 3: Keep buffer for the urgent job. Plan 80–85% of capacity. The last 15% is the urgent job that always comes, or overtime you don't want.

Route optimisation vs. route planning

These are used interchangeably, but they're different:

Route planning (ruteplanlegging) is deciding who does what, in what order, on which day.

Route optimisation is calculating the mathematically shortest/fastest order for a given set of stops — what Google Maps does when you ask it to "optimise route".

For service businesses, planning is what matters. Optimisation is a tool within the plan — but the order of stops is rarely the biggest problem. It's the competence match and the real-time overview that are the bottleneck.

Field Ops's AI dispatch combines both: real-time vehicle positions from ABAX, competence profiles per technician, and automated suggestions that show "move this job to Sofie — 6 km closer and available at 12". You approve it with one click. See AI dispatch in action.

Key figures to track

  • Billable rate: the share of the technician's working time that is billable. Benchmark for service businesses: 65–75%.
  • Drive time (kjøretid) per day: total time spent in the vehicle vs. time on the job. High drive time means poor clustering practice.
  • Percentage of urgent orders: the share of jobs not planned the evening before. Above 20–25% indicates that planning is reactive.

Frequently asked questions

Do we need GPS tracking for good route planning?

Not necessarily, but it helps a lot. Without GPS the coordinator depends on phoning around to find out who's done and where they are. With GPS that waiting time disappears and you can react faster to changes.

What's the difference between dispatch and route planning?

Dispatch is the act itself — assigning a specific job to a specific technician now. Route planning is the strategic work of structuring which jobs get done by whom, in what order, over a day or a week.

Can AI replace an experienced coordinator?

No — not on its own. AI-assisted dispatch gives good suggestions based on data, but the coordinator knows the context: that customer Halvorsen needs a specific technician, that the Hansen job has a parking problem, that Marte is on a course Thursday. AI replaces the repetitive work; the coordinator keeps control.

Summary

Good technician scheduling (montørplanlegging) balances competence, location and time — and handles the urgent job without ruining the rest of the day. Digital tools with a real-time overview and AI support reduce manual coordination work and increase the billable rate. The most important step is to make planning visible to everyone — not just in the coordinator's head.

See also: Digital work order: from quote to invoice · What is an order management system?

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