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Every landscaping company knows the hassles of getting from job to job and how much time and money gets wasted driving across town multiple times during a workday. No business owner wants their employees spending half their day in the company truck. Even with advances in technology, landscaping companies still waste unnecessary time on travel. Fortunately, you've got options.
Possible Landscaping Routing Solutions
So, how do you fix the windshield time issue? Employees extremely familiar with your service area can attempt to route a day's jobs from memory. However, trying to remember 100+ addresses, their exact location, and which one you should go to first will quickly exhaust even the most disciplined mind in your workforce. Plus, this is just a flimsy strategy for a business to rely on.
You can also try to sit down with pen, paper, and a map and make your routes at the beginning of each workday. However, this solution takes tons of time to accomplish. You would have to devote a big part of someone's job to doing this, which defeats the purpose of routing your jobs in the first place. All this does is transfer the wasted time/effort from field staff to the office staff!
You could also try relying on that new-fangled technology we mentioned earlier. You could provide your technicians with a list of all of their jobs for the day and let them route themselves. Let them punch addresses into their phone, find the closest one, and head there.
Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks for this strategy as well. First, techs still have to take time out of their day to do these calculations. All the time saved from driving gets lost in the effort to find the closest job. Also, this is not very customer friendly. Customers prefer to know for certain the time of day their services will get performed.
The Optimum Solution: Landscaping Routing Software
The best solution to tackle this tricky problem? Landscape routing software, more specifically the award-winning landscaping program Smart Service. With Smart Service, you can plan the most efficient workday possible, without the labor-intensive hassle of trying to figure things out by hand. Smart Service makes finding the most efficient route for your technicians as simple as clicking a button. Smart Service gives you all the benefits of efficient routes without any of the drawbacks the other solutions present. With a tool like Smart Service, you can maximize your techs' workdays without taking an inordinate amount of time or effort to do so.
So how does it work? In Smart Service, you can create every job with minimal effort (and you only have to create recurring jobs, like mowing services, once). Once those jobs get created, Smart Service will order them in the most efficient way possible, minimizing travel time.
Smart Service routing is also fully customizable. If there is a job that needs to be done first thing in a given day, you can make this happen. Simply move that job to the top of the list! If a specific job requires extra time and takes two hours when the rest only take one hour, you can have your jobs maintain that scheduling information.
With Smart Service, you can maximize the most of your tech’s day. This will prove vital in growing your business. Embrace the world of technology and allow the newest tools to drive the future of your landscaping business.
