Saving half an hour a day does not give you half an hour of work.
A technician does not bill minutes. They bill jobs, and a job here is 105 minutes of driving and working together. Saved driving turns into revenue only when it crosses that threshold — so the benefit arrives in steps, and most of it lands in the gaps between them.
- 105 min
- one job, door to door
- 32 min
- saved a day per technician
- 45%
- of that became a job
- 54,472
- SAR a month, all in
Watch the threshold, not the minutes
The day shortens smoothly. The next job arrives all at once, or not at all.
42 extra jobs, 84 hours of overtime gone
One technician, one day
383 min of a 480-minute shift · 97 min spare
Not enough yet — this day is 8 minutes short of fitting another 105-minute job.
198 h
driving removed
42
jobs that now fit
37%
of saved time became a job
6,526
SAR of overtime avoided
Extra jobs are counted only where the shorter driving created the room. The 159 job-slots that already fit in today's schedule are excluded — those are a dispatch conversation, not a saving, and billing them at 420 a call would be the easiest way to overstate this page.
Across 34 technicians and 22 working days, the average call is 29 minutes of driving and 76 minutes on site. That ratio is why routing gains are capped: you can only ever recover a share of the smaller number.
The reliable money is the boring money
Extra jobs are lumpy, need demand waiting to fill them, and convert at 45%. Overtime is smooth, needs nothing, and is paid at a rate you already know. Vendors lead with the first one.
39% of technician-days here already finish past the shift. Every minute cut from driving comes straight off that overrun before it does anything else, which is why the overtime column moves immediately and the jobs column waits.
| Saved per call | Per tech, per day | Extra jobs | Job revenue | Overtime saved | Converted | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 min | 8 min | 19 | 7,980 | 3,361 | 34% | 11,341 |
| 4 min | 16 min | 42 | 17,640 | 6,526 | 37% | 24,166 |
| 6 min | 24 min | 72 | 30,240 | 9,407 | 42% | 39,647 |
| 8 min | 32 min | 101 | 42,420 | 12,052 | 45% | 54,472 |
| 12 min | 45 min | 138 | 57,960 | 16,309 | 43% | 74,269 |
| 16 min | 56 min | 184 | 77,280 | 19,562 | 46% | 96,842 |
| 20 min | 66 min | 221 | 92,820 | 21,965 | 47% | 114,785 |
Jobs are valued at 420 and overtime at 78 an hour. Note the converted column: even at the top of the range, more than half the driving you remove never becomes billable work. That is not a failure of the routing — it is what happens when you shave minutes off a unit of work measured in hours.
159
jobs a month already fit, before anything changes
Fix the dispatch before you buy the routing
148 technician-days this month finish with at least one whole job's worth of shift unused — 159 jobs' worth in total, since the slackest of them could take two. At 420 a call that is 66,780 sitting in the schedule you already have, available to anyone willing to look at where the day actually ended rather than where it was planned to.
Every number elsewhere on this page excludes it. Counting it as a routing benefit would roughly double the headline and would be untrue — but it is the cheapest thing on the page to act on, and it is the reason the first month of a deployment is usually worth more than the software.
What a service fleet actually uses
The vehicle is a means to an end here. Everything that matters happens after the van stops, which makes this the fleet where pure tracking is least useful on its own.
- Jobs on the phone, not on paper
- The van's position is only useful next to what the technician is meant to be doing. Without the job, a map is a map.
- The next call, assigned live
- Reassigning the nearest available technician when a call comes in is where routing actually pays, rather than in the overnight plan.
- Arrival and departure, automatically
- Timestamps taken from the vehicle rather than typed by the technician are both more accurate and one less thing to ask of them.
- Proof you were there
- Photos and a signature bound to a place and a time settle the whole class of disputes that begins “nobody came”.
- Parts on the van
- The largest single cost in field service is a second visit, and it is usually caused by stock rather than by scheduling.
- Driving that nobody is proud of
- Service vans are driven hard between calls by people under time pressure. This is the fleet where coaching pays back fastest.
Four things this model assumes away
The arithmetic is clean and the working day is not. Each of these makes the jobs column smaller.
- Routing does not create demand
- An extra slot in the day is only worth something if there is a call waiting to fill it. In a quiet month the whole jobs column is zero and only the overtime saving is real.
- The first-time fix matters more than the route
- A return visit costs a whole cycle — travel, work and a customer who is now unhappy. Getting the right part on the van the first time beats any routing gain on this page.
- Technicians are not interchangeable
- Skills, tickets and vehicle stock all constrain who can take which call, so the optimiser has far less freedom than the arithmetic here implies.
- Squeezing the day has a cost
- A schedule with no slack turns every long job into a late finish and every late finish into a resignation. Some of the headroom in these numbers should stay headroom.
If you take one number from this page, take 12,052. It is the overtime that stops being worked when 32 minutes a day come out of the driving, it does not depend on demand existing to absorb it, and it is the only column here that arrives in the first month.