Eliminating the Run-Around: Saving Fuel Costs With Efficient Dispatching

With gasoline prices hitting record highs of $5 and even $6 a gallon in some states, consumers and businesses have felt the hit. For businesses like irrigation, landscaping and lawn care, the higher cost of fuel to power vehicles and equipment can further erode margins already impacted by higher labor and supply costs.

One way to reduce unnecessary fuel use is increasing efficiency in your dispatching. Organizing work orders and crews around jobs within close proximity reduces wasted miles going from job to job. Grouping jobs while maintaining service standards like turnaround times and urgent repairs can be challenging, so consider using a software solution that weighs those factors and job addresses to create the most efficient work plan for the day.

If you reimburse mileage for employees who drive their own vehicles to job sites, the IRS standard rate for 2022 is 58.5 cents per mile for business use, up 2.5 cents over last year. Consider asking or even incentivizing employees to carpool to job sites to reduce the miles you need to reimburse.

Making sure crews leave your warehouse with everything they need to do the jobs for that day can also help control fuel prices. Employees involved in sales, estimating and design should provide as much detail as possible so crews know what they will encounter on-site. Having that detail flow through to work orders, scheduling, equipment planning and parts inventory means fewer chances a crew member has to return to the warehouse for something needed to finish the job. Using a seamless, integrated system keeps all the information together and available to everyone on the team, especially compared to paper processes or rekeying information from one system into another. It’s like the old telephone game: the more times something needs to be recopied or repeated, the greater the likelihood detail is lost or misinterpreted.

Having the right human resources to complete a job can also cut down on return visits to the job site. With new variants of the coronavirus causing workers to be out ill or quarantined, companies need to be able to change assignments to deploy crew members most efficiently. Scheduling software can come to the rescue again, ensuring enough workers on a job to reduce the number of trips to the job site or grouping jobs to reduce travel distance.

In addition to reducing fuel consumption, efficiently scheduling and dispatching vehicles reduces carbon emissions, so you save the planet and save money!

EServ understands that making the best use of resources makes your business more profitable. Whether its people, parts, equipment or fuel, EServ brings all the data you need into one small business operating system that helps you control costs and grow revenue. EServ’s completely automated and paperless system for managing your business means you won’t need to learn yet another app or software to create and track job locations and work order needs to efficiently dispatch crews, saving you time and money.

In its first year operating partially on EServ, Millard Sprinkler realized a 20% increase in net income. The company fully transitioned to EServ in early 2022 and now makes the platform available to other busnesses. From initial customer contact to invoicing, inventory and incentivizing workers, EServ provides paperless processes that give small- and mid-sized businesses greater efficiency and higher revenue.

If you’re interested in being part of the EServ Evolution, please complete our contact form and a member of our team will be in touch.

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