CarpetBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

Auto-Routing Carpet Cleaning Jobs: Closest First or Furthest First From the Shop

A truck-mount van is not a sedan. It is heavy, it carries a full water tank and a waste tank that fills as the day goes, and every extra mile between jobs is time the crew is not cleaning. Putting a day's jobs in a sensible order is one of the easiest ways to get more cleaning out of the same van.

Auto-routing does that ordering for you in one click.

From the Board to the Route

The previous guide, The Carpet Cleaning Dispatch Board: Every Job by Day and by Van, covered how jobs get onto a van and a day. Once they are there, they need an order, and that is where routing comes in.

In CarpetBossPro, you filter the board to a van and a day and auto-route. The software orders that van's jobs from your shop in one of two ways: Closest First or Furthest First. The order shows on the board and on the tech's phone right away.

Closest First

Closest First starts with the job nearest the shop and works outward. It is the natural choice for most residential days:

• The crew starts cleaning sooner, with less drive time before the first job.
• The first customer of the day gets a reliable early start, which suits families who want the bedrooms dry by night.
• If the day runs long, the last jobs are the ones furthest out, and the office can decide early whether to push one.

The tradeoff is the drive home. The van ends the day at the far edge of the route and drives back to the shop at the end, when the crew is tired.

Furthest First

Furthest First does the opposite. The van drives out to the far job first and works its way back toward the shop:

• The long drive happens in the morning, when the crew is fresh.
• The day ends near the shop, which helps when the van needs to dump waste, refill and restock before tomorrow.
• A late finish is a short drive home instead of a long one.

Furthest First works well for days that cover an outlying town or a far side of the service area. Get to the furthest customer early, then clean your way home.

Routing Works Best on a Day Built by Area

Auto-routing puts jobs in a good order, but it cannot fix a day that was badly built. If Monday has two jobs on the north side and two on the far south side, no order makes that drive short. The real savings come from building each day around one area, which is what the Waiting List map is for. Pick the cluster of due homes on one side of town, assign them to the same van and day, then auto-route. That is covered in Filling a Carpet Cleaning Day by Area Instead of Driving Across Town.

Adjusting After Auto-Route

Auto-routing gives you a starting order, not a final one. Carpet cleaning has a lot of time constraints that a map cannot see:

• A customer who has to leave by ten and wants to be home for the walk-through.
• A move-out that has to be finished before the landlord's inspection.
• A home with a new baby where the family asked for the afternoon.
• An office that must be done before staff arrive.

After auto-routing, move those jobs by hand to the spot they need. The rest stay in the routed order. The next guide covers setting route order by hand in more detail.

What the Tech and Customer See

The routed order shows on the tech's phone. The tech works the list top to bottom, taps navigation on each card, and taps Start when they arrive. Customers get on-the-way and arrived texts automatically as the van works the route, and the customer app shows their place in line on a live map, such as “You're stop 3 of 6.”

Because those customer messages follow the route, a good order also means fewer surprised customers. The house that was told it was third really is third.

Making Routing a Habit

The best time to route is the afternoon before, once tomorrow's jobs are set. Filter to each van, auto-route, fix the one or two jobs with a time constraint, and print a route sheet if your techs like paper. It takes a few minutes per van and saves far more than that in drive time.

To see how routing fits with the dispatch board, the Waiting List and customer texts, visit the CarpetBossPro carpet cleaning scheduling software page.