Route planning for a small field team pays for itself fast

3 days ago
3 min read

Introduction

A field team of four engineers, each driving two hours a day, is spending forty hours a week travelling. None of it is billable, all of it consumes fuel and vehicle wear, and in most businesses it is planned by whoever answers the phone, in the order the jobs came in.

Cutting that by a quarter returns ten hours a week — enough for two or three additional jobs — and the saving is immediate rather than speculative. This is one of the few operational improvements where the arithmetic is unambiguous, which is why it is worth doing properly rather than approximately.

1. Route planning for a small field team is about billable hours, not fuel

Fuel is the smaller saving.

An hour of travel removed is an hour of chargeable work gained, which is worth several times the fuel. Framing it this way changes both the priority and the amount you are willing to spend on solving it.

2. Measure your current travel time before anything else

The baseline is the argument.

Total driving hours per engineer per week, and the ratio of travel to on-site time. Most firms have never calculated this and are surprised by it, and the number is what justifies changing a working practice people are attached to.

3. Geography beats urgency in the schedule

The habit that costs most.

Jobs are commonly sequenced by when they were booked, which sends a van across town and back. Grouping by area, with urgent work slotted into the nearest available window, is the single largest available improvement.

4. Include the constraints that actually bind

An impossible route is worse than a poor one.

Appointment windows, customer access hours, skills and certifications, parts on the van, congestion charges, parking, and vehicle restrictions. A plan that ignores these gets overridden on the first morning.

5. Estimate job duration properly

The largest source of plan failure.

Routes fail because jobs overrun, not because the driving was miscalculated. Use recorded actual durations by job type rather than a standard slot, and the plan survives contact with the day.

6. Leave slack in the day

Optimising to capacity guarantees failure.

One overrun cascades through every subsequent appointment and the customers at the end are the ones who suffer. A deliberate gap in the middle of the day absorbs this and costs less than the complaints it prevents.

7. Plan the day before, not the same morning

When the value appears.

A route planned the previous afternoon means the first job starts on time, parts are loaded, and the engineer knows the day. Same-morning planning loses the first hour, every day, across every vehicle.

8. Give the engineer the ability to reorder

They know things the plan does not.

Access problems, a customer who is never in before ten, a site with a difficult delivery. Allow local resequencing within the day and record it, because the pattern of overrides is the best source of improvement to the plan.

9. Track jobs per engineer per day as the headline

Not miles.

Miles saved is a proxy. Completed jobs per engineer per day is the outcome, and it captures the effect of better sequencing, better duration estimates and earlier starts together. Watch first-time fix rate alongside it so speed is not bought with return visits.

Tell customers about arrival windows and changes. Tight routing that produces missed windows costs more in reputation than it saves in travel.

Conclusion

Treat travel as lost billable hours, because that is the real size of the cost.

Measure current driving hours and the travel-to-site ratio before changing anything, sequence by geography with urgent work slotted in rather than by booking order, model appointment windows, skills and parts as hard constraints, use recorded actual job durations instead of standard slots, leave deliberate slack so one overrun does not cascade, plan the day before rather than the same morning, let engineers reorder locally and record why, and track completed jobs per engineer per day with first-time fix rate beside it.