How to replan the day when an emergency comes in

When an emergency comes in, replanning the day means first deciding what drops out of the plan, and only then calling the technician. An emergency job is not added to the plan, it is always swapped for something. The procedure has three steps: pick the technician who is nearest and has the qualification, identify the order that can take a move, and without delay inform the customer whose appointment is being cancelled.

• An emergency does not take an extra hour, it takes an hour from someone else. It is always a swap, not an addition.
• The longest part of replanning is not the drive, but finding the answer to who is free and has the qualification.
• The decision belongs to one person. Two people negotiating over the phone is the reason the customer learns about the cancellation late.
• The customer whose appointment is dropped is called before the technician sets off for the emergency.
• The job has to be entered in the plan even when the technician is already on the way. Otherwise the day gets replanned a second time.

Why an emergency upsets even a well-built plan

Not because of the time it takes. An emergency job usually takes a few hours, which a well-built day could absorb. What upsets it is uncertainty: at the moment it is reported, nobody knows who to send without something else falling through the cracks.

So the planner starts phoning around. They ask one technician where they are, ask another whether they could make it, look in the spreadsheet to see whether anyone is on holiday. By the time they decide, half an hour has passed and in the meantime the other orders have slipped too, because the technicians were waiting for an answer. The breakdown itself is not to blame for this loss.

The second cause is quieter. The emergency job often does not get written down anywhere, because "it is for today and everyone knows about it". In the afternoon the planner then sees the technician as free and assigns them more work. The day gets replanned a second time, this time on the basis of wrong information.

Three questions that have to be answered within ten minutes

First: who has the qualification for this job. Without it, the question of distance and time is moot. Second: which of these people is nearest today. Third: what that person had on today and what of it can take a move.

The order matters. Most companies start from the third question, that is, they look for a gap in the plan, and only then find out whether the chosen technician has the licence. If they do not, the whole procedure starts again from the beginning.

The answer to the first two questions should come from a tool, not from memory. Capacity and skills keep each technician's qualifications and recorded absences, so the filter rules out people without the licence before the route is even considered. If holidays are in one file, qualifications in another and the plan in a third, there is no quick answer and the decision is made from memory.

Step-by-step procedure

1. Enter the emergency job in the plan as an order before you call anyone. An unentered job does not exist for anyone but you.
2. Filter out the technicians who do not have the qualification for this work. The rest of the reasoning concerns only those who remain.
3. From them, pick the one whose plan for today can take the biggest move. Not the most experienced one, and not the nearest one, if they have an assignment today that cannot be moved.
4. Decide which of their orders is cancelled. The decision is made now, not after the call with the technician.
5. Call the customer whose appointment is dropped. Straight away with an offer of a replacement date, not with a plea for understanding.
6. Only then call the technician and enter the change in the plan so that the others can see it.

Step five is tempting to put off, because it is the most unpleasant. But it is precisely putting it off that turns an ordinary operational change into a complaint.

Which order to move

Not every one moves equally well. The following breakdown is enough and can be done in a moment.

The rule that follows from the table: first look among orders that have no confirmed appointment with the customer, and only when there is none, touch the confirmed ones.

See the whole week, not just today

Replanning the day is often not about today. The order that drops out of today has to go somewhere, and the worst choice is "next time, we will see". Such an order disappears from the plan and comes back as a customer complaint.

In the planning board technicians are in rows and days in columns, so the moved order is dragged to another day and you can see whose slot you are taking up with it. A multi-day installation stays one bar, so it cannot happen that the first day moves and the middle one stays where it was.

The difference from a spreadsheet is when the problem shows up. A column in Excel does not highlight an empty slot and does not know that the technician is assigned elsewhere at the same time. A grid with clash detection reports it at the moment of entry, when the fix costs nobody a phone call.

The customer whose appointment is dropped

Cancelling an appointment is not a mistake, if it comes in time and with a replacement. The mistake is silence until the afternoon. Three things the call contains: what happened, when you will come instead, and who will confirm it.

It is best to offer two specific dates, not the question "when would suit you". An open question takes the arrangement back to the start and one call turns into three.

When several cancelled appointments pile up, it is quicker to let the customer choose themselves. A link to pick from free slots in the appointment calendar replaces phoning around, and the chosen appointment appears in the plan without anyone copying it over from a note.

So that the day is not replanned a second time

The most common second wave of confusion does not come from the emergency, but from the entry that is missing. The technician left for the breakdown, it did not get into the plan, and in the afternoon someone assigns them another order.

The mobile for technicians runs in a browser and the technician starts and finishes the work in it, so the office can see what they are on right now. Writing it up afterwards in the evening goes away and the plan matches reality continuously, not only after the shift.

A practical rule: if a technician is going somewhere, it has to be in the plan within a few minutes. Not for the sake of control, but so that nobody counts them as free.

When emergencies are the rule, not the exception

If the day is replanned every other day, the fault is not in the procedure but in the plan. Either it is planned to one hundred percent of capacity and has nowhere to give, or ordinary work that nobody wanted to deal with earlier is being labelled as an emergency.

A look back tells them apart. Go through the last month and mark the jobs that were truly urgent. The rest are postponed things that turned urgent, and those are solved by better planning, not faster replanning.

When you do not need to deal with this

A company with one or two technicians who travel together replans the day in one sentence. There, a new tool brings more work than benefit and a phone is enough.

The turning point comes when orders run in parallel, appointments change and the planner is no longer sure they remember everything correctly. From that moment it is not about the speed of the decision, but about the remaining five people seeing the decision without another call.

Frequently asked questions