DumpsterBossPro Blog — Dumpster Rental Software

Running the Dumpster Dispatch Board by Truck and Day

The dispatch board is the plan for the day. On a whiteboard, it is a grid of truck numbers and addresses in dry-erase marker, smudged by noon. In software, it is the same idea, except it is current, it is on every screen and it is what the drivers actually see.

Assigning Roll-Off Jobs to a Driver and Truck in One Step covered getting jobs from the Waiting List to a driver and truck. This guide covers where those jobs live once they are assigned.

Organized by Truck and Day

In DumpsterBossPro, the dispatch board shows every truck's jobs by day in route order. Today, tomorrow and later in the week each have their own view. A contractor's scheduled swap for Friday sits on Friday's board under the truck that will do it, not on a sticky note waiting for Friday to arrive.

Organizing by truck makes capacity obvious. You can see that truck 1 has nine stops tomorrow and truck 2 has four. You can see that Thursday is already full and Monday is wide open. That tells the office what to promise the next customer who calls.

It also makes the yard plan obvious. If tomorrow's board shows six deliveries of 20s and you know you only have four empties of that size sitting in the yard, you can see the problem the afternoon before instead of the morning of. Push a delivery, line up a pull that frees a can first, or offer the customer a different size.

What a Good Day Looks Like on the Board

A good roll-off day has a shape. Deliveries early, so customers can start loading. Swaps when contractors need them, often first thing. Pulls through the middle of the day, grouped near the disposal sites. A last delivery or two near the yard at the end. The board lets you see whether each truck's day has that shape or is bouncing all over the map.

Each job on the board shows its type, size, site and haul-to. A dispatcher scanning it can tell at a glance whether the truck is going out with the right can first, and whether the loads are headed to facilities that make sense for the route.

Same-Day Requests

Roll-off work is mostly scheduled, but same-day requests are where you win contractor loyalty. When a swap comes in at 9 a.m., look at the board for the truck that will be closest and has room. Assign the request to that truck for today and it drops into the day. The driver sees it in his app.

The board makes it honest. If every truck is already full, you can see it, and you can tell the contractor the truth: this afternoon, or first thing tomorrow. That is better than promising and missing.

Moving Jobs Between Days

Customers change their minds about delivery dates constantly. Weather pushes a roofing job. A closing date slips. When that happens, move the job to the new day on the board. It leaves today's plan and shows up on the right day under the right truck.

Be careful with rentals that are already out. Moving a pickup changes when the can comes back, which changes the rental days. That is fine, and the extra days will be counted on the invoice when the pickup date is set, but the customer should know if their rental is running past the days included.

The Board and the Drivers

The board is not a separate thing from the driver app. It is the same data. When the office changes the order of a truck's jobs, the driver sees the new order. When the driver taps start or complete, the board updates. Nobody has to call in to say a job is done.

That makes the board useful in real time. At 2 p.m., you can look at it and see which trucks are ahead and which are behind, and move work between them before the day gets away from you.

Drivers like it too, though few will admit it. A driver who can see his whole day in order knows when he will be done, which loads are going where and whether lunch is going to happen before or after the landfill run.

Making the Board the Source of Truth

The board only works if it is the one and only plan. Turn off the whiteboard, or at least stop updating it. Make every change in the system. If a driver does a job that was not on his list, it gets entered and marked complete so the rental dates and billing are right.

The next guide covers route order and auto-routing within each truck's day. To see how the board fits into the whole system, visit the DumpsterBossPro dumpster rental software page.