Scheduling & logistics
Rosters, routes and capacity that hold up on contact.
A roster built on a whiteboard and a lot of memory
Rosters, routes and capacity plans are built by someone with a whiteboard and a lot of institutional memory. They mostly work, they take hours every week, and they fall apart when somebody calls in sick or a customer moves a window.
Scheduling that respects your real constraints
Scheduling and routing that respects the constraints you actually have — qualifications, working-time rules, vehicle capacity, service windows, the fact that two particular people cannot be on the same shift — and that can be re-run in seconds when reality changes.
The rebuild-under-disruption case is usually where the value is. A plan that is 3% better on Monday morning is worth less than one you can honestly redo at 7am when a van breaks down.
What the scheduling engagement leaves behind
- A plan that satisfies the hard constraints, with the soft ones traded off explicitly.
- Fast re-planning, so a disruption is a re-run rather than an afternoon.
- Fairness made visible — who got the unsociable shifts, over what period.
The honest limit: the constraints have to be written down truthfully
Honest limit: the constraints have to be written down truthfully. Half the work of these engagements is discovering the rules everyone follows and nobody has recorded.
Where this starts
A week-long diagnostic, fixed fee, ending in a written assessment that names the decision, the measurable outcome and whether this is worth building at all.