Drive time is eating our days. Is that a routing problem or a territory problem?
Look at the distribution of individual legs, not the daily total. Routing waste shows up as long hops between jobs that were geographically close but scheduled in the wrong order. Territory sprawl shows up as long first and last legs and a wide spread of job locations no matter how you order them. Routing you fix with dispatch discipline; sprawl you fix by changing the service area or adding a base.
Stop looking at the daily total
Total drive minutes per truck per day is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Two shops with identical daily totals can have completely different problems, and the fix for one makes the other worse.
Break the day into legs: base to first job, each job to the next, last job to base. Record the minutes and the straight-line distance for each. Now the shape of the problem is visible.
Two signatures that look the same in a summary
A quick test: re-sequence a bad day on paper by nearest-neighbour order and recompute the driving. If the total drops sharply, it was routing. If it barely moves, it was sprawl.
- Routing waste. Mid-day legs are long relative to the straight-line spread of the day's jobs. The truck crossed the market and came back. Jobs that were near each other were dispatched hours apart. This is a sequencing failure and it is fixable this week.
- Territory sprawl. The first and last legs are long, the job locations are genuinely far apart, and even a perfectly ordered day would drive most of those miles. No dispatcher can order their way out of it.
What actually causes routing waste
Rarely incompetence. Usually constraints that were invisible to whoever built the board: a customer window that only worked at two o'clock, a skill that only one technician has, a membership visit slotted without regard to location, or a same-day add dropped into the middle of a routed day.
The practical fixes are structural rather than heroic — zone the market and assign trucks to zones, batch membership and maintenance visits by zone rather than by due date, and hold same-day adds until there is a routing-sensible place to put them. Pulling the dispatch timestamps into a reporting layer is what makes the pattern arguable with evidence instead of anecdotes.
When sprawl is the answer, the choices are strategic
Sprawl has only a few honest responses: shrink the service radius, add a satellite base or stocking point, put a dedicated truck on the far zone and accept lower density there, or price and schedule distant work differently so it batches into specific days.
The one thing not to do is keep treating it as a dispatch performance issue. Sprawl also distorts everything downstream — utilization, jobs per truck-day, and any comparison between technicians who work different halves of the map. Normalizing for it is part of getting operational reporting to tell the truth.
Topics: drive time · dispatch · routing · service area
Have a version of this question about your own business?
The useful answer usually depends on which systems you run and how they're connected. That's a conversation, not a blog post.