Field services
The field lives in the margin the demo forgets. Travel, appointments, and crew availability all move hour to hour, and no model can change the fact that yesterday's route sometimes lies.
Field services run on a constraint the office does not feel: the work is mostly about position. A half-hour of stuck traffic, a property that rejects access, a crew finishing late on a different job — a dispatch change has to ripple across all of it, and the customer was promised a window.
The productive problem is not 'predict the route'; it's 'make the promise elastic enough that the plan still holds when reality does its thing'. That means the forecast has to know the few things that actually decide the outcome: where crews are, what the next job is, and what the customer was promised.
What you get
The promise, kept honest. Direction, not invented numbers.
- 01
Arrival windows that survive the day's traffic, not just the morning's plan
- 02
Dispatch that knows the bottleneck is the person, and routes around it
- 03
A view of the field that reconciles what the app, the truck, and the customer each know
The constraints
The parts that make this industry different. If one of these sounds like your problem, that is the conversation to have.
- The plan is a living document — the scheduler has to consume displacement, not to propagate it out
- Appointment windows are promises that cost money when broken — last-minute rework is expensive
- The definition of 'on time' differs from within the dispatch, the crew, and the customer
- Field data is lower-quality at the edge: no signal, skipped screens, backlogged logs
How we deliver
The engineering gates that separate a demo from a deployment in this industry.
- The late-arrival and no-show data treated as signal, not noise — the model is allowed to be humbled
- Confidence intervals on the ETA as part of the product, not behind an API
- Offline-first given the field reality — the app must work when the crew is between towers
Call us when
- The customer promise is a convention, and the dispatcher is the only one enforcing it
- Crews are disincentivized by routing that ignores what happened yesterday
- You have never counted the cost of a missed arrival window
Building in field services?
Describe the situation in a paragraph. We will tell you what we would look at first and what it would cost to find out.