TowingBossPro Blog — Towing Software

Route Order and Auto-Routing for Scheduled Tows and Transports

Routing in towing is different from routing in most service trades. A pest control route or a pool service route is a loop of stops planned the day before. A tow truck's day is a chain of pickups and drop-offs where the end of one tow decides where the next one starts, and half the chain didn't exist at 7 a.m.

In Running the Dispatch Board by Truck and Day, we looked at the dispatch board by truck and day. This article covers the order of calls within each truck's list.

Where Routing Actually Helps a Towing Company

Routing is most valuable on the work you can see coming: scheduled transports, dealer moves, repair shop runs, a batch of roadside calls clustered in one area, or the morning after a storm when the Waiting List is full of tows that will all wait a few hours anyway. On those lists, the order of stops can easily be the difference between finishing at four and finishing at seven.

For a single emergency call — a car in a travel lane — routing is irrelevant. You go. The skill is knowing which calls belong in a planned route and which jump the line.

Route Order on the Board

On the TowingBossPro dispatch board, each truck's calls have a route order. That order is what the driver sees in the app: first call, second call, third. Dispatch can drag calls into the order they want, and drivers always work from the current version.

Because every call has both a pickup and a drop-off, a sensible order is about chaining the end of one job to the start of the next. Dropping at a body shop on the west side and then picking up two blocks away beats crossing back through town.

Letting Auto-Routing Do the First Pass

Auto-routing puts a truck's stops in a sensible sequence automatically. It is a good first pass on lists with several stops, especially scheduled work. Rather than spending ten minutes ordering a dealer's eight-car move by hand, dispatch lets auto-routing propose an order and then adjusts what needs adjusting.

The point isn't to hand dispatch over to the software. It is to remove the tedious part so the dispatcher's judgment goes to the calls that need it.

Re-run it when the list changes. If an emergency call gets slotted into the middle of a planned transport run, the rest of the stops may make more sense in a different order afterward. A quick second pass after the interruption keeps the truck from finishing the day zig-zagging between the leftovers.

When to Override the Order

Routes should bend for real reasons. A few common ones:

• A stranded customer on a highway shoulder or in an unsafe spot goes before a vehicle sitting safely in a driveway.
• A shop that closes at five has to get its drop before then, even if it is out of the way.
• A customer with a time window — a dealer expecting a unit at ten — sets a fixed point the rest of the route works around.
• A call that needs a specific truck setup should stay with that truck, even if another truck is closer.

Put the reason in the call notes when you override, so the driver understands why the order looks odd and doesn't "fix" it on his own.

Navigation and Texts Follow the Order

Once the order is set, the driver app does the rest: calls in sequence, one-tap navigation to each pickup and drop-off, and one-tap on-the-way and arrival texts. Customers on a planned route get a heads-up when the driver is actually headed their way, and in the customer app they can watch the driver on a live map. That matters on scheduled work, where a dealer or a homeowner is waiting on a specific vehicle.

Notes and access notes travel with each stop as well, so a planned route doesn't stall at the third stop because nobody mentioned the gate code or the after-hours key drop. The driver sees what he needs for each call when he reaches it in the order.

Measure It Over Time

You'll know routing is working when drivers stop complaining about crossing town and the same trucks finish more calls in a day. Look at completed calls per truck in your reports over a few weeks, especially on days dominated by scheduled transports. If one truck consistently finishes fewer, look at its routes before blaming the driver.

Routing is one piece of dispatch, and dispatch is one piece of running the company. The whole system is laid out on the towing software page.