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Solution · Operations & productionEvery visit is confirmed before the crew gets into the van
Field crews: schedules and confirmations
A robot watches the crew calendar: the customer gets a confirmation at once and a reminder the day before, silence becomes an office phone call rather than an empty drive. The crew sees the day’s route on a phone, and the completion report is made on site.
Executive summary
Visits are booked by phone a week ahead and never confirmed after; customers forget, crews drive to empty addresses, and the schedule lives in the boss’s head and collapses at every change.
After booking, the customer gets a confirmation, and a day before the visit a reminder asking for one click; no reaction becomes an office call before departure, not a surprise on site.
Empty drives all but vanish, crews fit more installations into the same days, schedule changes reach everyone at once, and completion reports stop dying in van glove boxes.
the crew calendar; texts to customers; day routes on crew phones; on-site reports; cases in Microsoft Teams
Business problem
The van drives, the door stays shut
An installation firm sells crew hours, and crew hours are burned by driving. Every trip is people, a van and fuel invested in the assumption that the customer will be home, prepared, and remembering a date agreed ten days ago by phone. That assumption fails regularly, and always at the firm’s expense.
An empty drive is not just a lost day: it is a slot that must be found again in a tight schedule, a customer with grievances though he forgot himself, and a crew that returns demotivated. And since the schedule lives in the boss’s head and on the office board, every change, a shift, an illness, an overrunning job, requires a chain of calls: to customers, to crews, and back.
Crews get the day’s plan in the morning, verbally or on paper; when something changes mid-day, they sometimes drive by the old version. Site documents, the handover report, photos, the customer’s signature, return to the office in the van’s glove box on Friday, if at all. The invoice waits for the report, the report waits for Friday, the cash waits for everything in turn.
The owner spends evenings solving tomorrow’s puzzle, and still something derails every week: no confirmations, a change that did not arrive, paper left in the van. The firm’s scale stalls not for lack of orders, but for coordination that no longer fits in one head.
How it works today
Below is what the work looks like before anything is automated.
- PersonThe visit booked by phone a week ahead; then silence until installation day
- Risk of errorThe customer forgets or is unprepared; the crew drives blind
- WaitingAn empty drive: two crew hours, fuel and a slot to be found anew
- PersonSchedule changes travel by phone chains; someone always gets the old version
- Risk of errorReports and signatures return in the glove box on Friday, if at all
- Risk of errorThe invoice waits for the report, the report for Friday, the cash for everything in turn
Why the current process costs more than it appears
The bill that never shows up in a budget.
- An empty drive costs twice: the burned crew hours and the slot that blocked the schedule and earned nothing.
- The boss’s evenings over the schedule are the firm’s most expensive hours spent on dispatcher work.
- A report in a glove box is an invoice issued a week late; multiplied across all jobs, it is a standing loan to customers.
- A crew with a hole in its day after an empty drive rarely fills it; that time is lost whole.
Cost of inaction
The first row is easy to count at home: empty or unprepared trips a month times the crew’s full cost per trip. It usually comes to a sum that would pay another fitter.
The model does not price the lost capacity: the days when the hole after an empty drive could not be filled with anything. In season that is often a bigger loss than the fuel and hours themselves.
A model organisation with realistic proportions – the numbers exist so you can run the same maths on your own data; they are not a client result.
A firm installing air conditioning and heat pumps: three two-man crews, a half-time office, around 95 visits a month in season, Microsoft 365.
Visits booked by phone at the quote; no confirmations; the schedule on a board and in the owner’s head.
On average 8-9 empty or unprepared trips a month in season; changes distributed by phone.
Reports return on Fridays; invoicing lags; the schedule eats the owner’s evenings.
After booking, the customer gets a text with the confirmation and what to prepare; a day before the visit a reminder with a one-click confirmation; no reaction by 5 p.m. becomes an office case; crews see the day route on their phones, changes arrive instantly; the report with a signature and photos is made on site and triggers the invoice at once.
In the modelled case empty drives fall fourfold, and each crew gains several installations a month in season within the same working hours. Model numbers, not the firm’s records.
Proposed solution
We start with your rules: what the customer must prepare before installation, when reminders go out, what happens when there is no answer, and who decides on reshuffling a day. We write it down once; from then on the robot watches it, not the office’s memory.
There is one crew calendar, living in Microsoft 365: a visit booked at the quote immediately sends the customer a confirmation with the preparation list. A day before the visit the customer gets a reminder asking for a one-click confirmation; whoever has not answered by the afternoon joins the office’s short call list, so the crew never leaves blind. A schedule change updates the day route on the crew’s phones and sends customers new times without a single call.
After the job the crew makes the report on site: photos, notes, the customer’s finger signature. The report lands in the register at once and triggers the invoice, instead of riding in a glove box until Friday. The owner sees all crews’ days in Teams: confirmed, at risk, completed, and stops being a one-person dispatch office.
UiPath Orchestrator: reminder schedules, the visit queue, retries and an audit trail; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Teams, Outlook 365 and SharePoint; the SMS gateway you already use
Confirmations and reminders with preparation lists, the office call list, day routes on crew phones, on-site signed reports and automatic invoice triggering
The crew calendar in Microsoft 365; reports in SharePoint; the report form on a crew phone; the SMS gateway via API
How the automated process works
- AutomationA booked visit immediately sends the customer a confirmation with the preparation list
- AutomationA day before the visit the customer gets a reminder with a one-click confirmation
- PersonNo answer by the afternoon joins the office’s short call list
- SystemA schedule change updates routes on crew phones and times with customers
- PersonThe crew makes the report on site: photos, notes, a finger signature
- AutomationThe report triggers the invoice the same day; the register holds the complete file
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Confirmations, reminders and watching customer responses
- Day routes on crew phones and distributing changes without calls
- The report register and invoice triggering after completion
People decide
- The installation itself and technical decisions on site; the robot holds no spirit level
- Calls to customers from the no-answer list and reshuffling decisions
- The rules: the preparation list, the reminder rhythm, the change policy
Before and after
Systems and integrations
The stack is short on purpose: one engine, one execution layer, one place where a person decides.
Inputs
- the crew calendar with visits
- customer responses from texts
- reports from crew phones
- preparation and reminder rules
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- confirmed visits and the at-risk list
- current day routes on crew phones
- reports in the register and invoices triggered the same day
Human touchpoints: the call list and cases in Microsoft Teams; the all-crews day view; a rules review before the season
Technologies used
reminder schedules, the visit queue, retries, a record of every message
Aday routes, office cases, report writes
Aone crew calendar instead of a board and the owner’s head
Athe visit and report register with history and permissions
Aconfirmations and reminders; we work with the gateway you already use
BHow we deliver this
From this description to a running process
We deliver this solution through our process automation service: first we measure the process on company data, then we build, test and maintain the robots.
Industry
Case studies
Delivered client work is described under Case studies.
Illustrative economic model
Numbers you can check against your own data.
The model assumes some empty drives always remain, because life; it counts the difference made by confirmations caught a day earlier. Volumes and rates belong to the scenario; your own numbers go into the calculator alongside.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate based on your inputs. It models freed capacity, not promised savings.
Business benefits
- Crews drive only where someone waits, prepared
- The same crews fit in more installations, because holes after empty drives vanish
- Schedule changes reach everyone at once; the old version stops existing
- Reports stop getting lost, and invoices go out on installation day
- The owner gets his evenings back; the day view replaces the dispatch office in his head
The management view
- Coordination stops limiting growth; a fourth crew is a calendar row, not a second head for the boss
- Every job’s complete file sits in the register from completion day
- The customer gets big-contractor communication from a firm with three vans
Board-level KPIs
empty and unprepared trips · visits confirmed before departure · time from completion to invoice · installations per crew per month · phone coordination hours
Security and governance
The automation has exactly the permissions it needs. Not one more.
- The robot works on visit data: address, contact, scope, dates; nothing beyond the job’s needs
- Reports with photos and signatures have restricted access and an agreed retention
- Every message and schedule change has a record: what, when, to whom
- A day route is visible to the crew it concerns; the office and owner see the whole
- Data stays in your Microsoft 365 tenant and your SMS gateway; the robots run in the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud
Why now
Crew hour and fuel costs have risen enough that an empty drive stopped being negligible.
Customers are used to confirmations and time windows from couriers; a firm without them looks unserious.
The season is unforgiving: every schedule hole at the peak is an installation that will not happen this year.
Relevant executive roles
Gets his evenings back and sees all crews’ days in one place
Calls only where there is no answer; the rest confirms itself
Sees the route on a phone, drives to prepared customers, makes the report in five minutes
Common questions and objections
The call list will: whoever does not confirm by text goes to the office to be phoned, which is exactly where everyone would go today. The difference is the office calls a few people instead of all of them, and no missing confirmation slips through unnoticed.
Which is exactly why it needs one source instead of a board and phones: a change entered once travels by itself to crews and customers. The system does not stiffen the schedule; it makes its volatility stop costing a chain of calls and mistakes.
The phone report is photos, two fields and the customer’s finger signature: quicker than writing paper on the van’s bonnet. And for the fitter it means one thing: nobody calls on Friday asking where Tuesday’s report is.
When this is not the right solution
- One crew and a few visits a week: a phone calendar and keeping one’s word suffice
- Working purely through subcontractors with no control of their calendars: first settle who rules the dates
- Expecting courier-grade route optimisation: this is order and confirmations, not a TSP algorithm
A question for the next management meeting
How many empty drives did we have last month, and what else would have fit in the schedule without them?
Implementation approach
Scope without ambiguity, before anything is signed.
We deliver
- One crew calendar with customer confirmations and reminders
- The office call list for unanswered reminders
- Day routes on crew phones with instant changes
- On-site signed reports and automatic invoice triggering
- The owner’s day view and two weeks of parallel running
We need from you
- Your rules: the customer preparation list, the reminder rhythm, the change policy
- An SMS gateway and the crews’ phones (the ones they have suffice)
- Your current booking practice, to tie it into the calendar
Stages
Discovery
How you book, how many empty drives, how reports circulate
Rules
Customer preparations, the reminder rhythm, the no-answer path, the report template
Build
The calendar, texts, day routes, reports, Teams cases
Parallel run
Two weeks: the system runs, the board hangs alongside, we count empty drives
Go-live
Full traffic before the season; a numbers review after a month
A quick win. Everything runs on Microsoft 365 and your SMS gateway; the crews’ existing phones are enough.
Tuesday, 7:40 a.m.: the crew at the scheduled address. The gate locked, the phone silent. Forty minutes each way, and the whole day to rearrange.
Count your empty drives from the last quarter and send us the result with your visit count. We return the loss arithmetic and a confirmation design that stops them.
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