trakki
Route planning for field service technicians
By Manuel Ober · · 4 min read
Maintenance can be planned, a breakdown cannot
Field service lives in two worlds. Maintenance runs to a cycle: a heating system once a year, a lift every quarter, the coffee machine in a works canteen every month. A breakdown has no cycle. It comes when it comes, and the customer is waiting.
Keep both in a notebook and the maintenance drops out of sight the moment a week fills up with breakdowns. Come autumn, 40 heating systems are overdue, and overdue maintenance turns into breakdowns.
Maintenance as a due date
In trakki every unit is a customer with a cycle: every 365 days, every 90, every 30. The last visit plus the cycle gives the due date. The map shows it in colour: red for overdue, yellow for due soon, green for fine.
Tap “Plan week” and trakki builds the week from the red and yellow dots and keeps the detours short: one day in the north, one in the south. You set the time on site for each unit: 90 minutes for a heating service, 20 for a visual inspection. The guide Get your Excel customer list onto a map shows how your list of units gets there.
A breakdown comes in
The phone rings at half past eight. The heating at a primary school in Wels has stopped, and the children are sitting in class with their coats on. That job comes first.
You add the school to today's plan as a fixed appointment at ten and tap “Plan again”. The appointment stays where you put it, and trakki plans the rest of the day around it. Four services were still ahead of you. Now perhaps two fit. The other two stay red or yellow on the map, so you do not have to remember them. If this week has no room left, they come first when you plan the next one.
A list does not know that the breakdown is in Wels and your next service in Steyr. The map does.
What happened last time
What you replaced, which part was missing, who the caretaker is: the customer file lists every visit to the unit with its note. A task for next time, such as “Bring a new filter”, is attached to the unit itself. Before you set off, you check the file instead of ringing the office.
If the customer or your company wants a record, you send an Excel file with every visit, its date and its note.
A day with trakki
Seven o'clock. The day is on your phone: five services in one area, drive times in between, the planned time at each unit. For the drive to the first customer, trakki opens Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze.
Half past eight. The school in Wels. You put it in at ten and plan again.
At each unit. One line: what was done, what is missing, when to come back.
Friday. Instead of writing up every evening by hand, you export your visits to Excel and filter them down to this week.
Which software does what
There are three kinds of tool for job planning, and each solves a different problem.
Field service systems run a whole team: they distribute jobs, assign technicians, book spare parts and record hours. They pay off when a dispatcher sends several technicians out. If you plan your own territory, you do not need one.
Route optimisers put many addresses in an order that keeps the driving short. They come into their own at twenty stops a day. That is delivery work, not service, where one job often takes an hour.
Planning tools for the individual answer the questions that come up in service every day: which unit is due, what is on the way, and what still fits once the breakdown is done? That is what trakki is built for.
The guide Field sales software compares these three and two more: Excel and map services.
What stays with you
Lists of units with locations and contact names do not belong on an outside provider's server. trakki has no server for them, and you need no account: the list is stored on your phone. If you sync, a copy encrypted with your sync password goes to your own cloud or NAS; even so, keep door codes out of your notes.
To find addresses and work out drive times, trakki asks the map service Stadia Maps. It gets addresses and coordinates, and a customer's name as you type it in. Never your notes. The rest is in the privacy notice.
Where trakki stops
trakki is not a job management system, not dispatch for a team and not spare-parts management. It plans the visits of one technician with their own territory and keeps the notes for each unit. If a dispatcher hands you your jobs, you use trakki for your own day. On the home page you can try trakki in your browser with sample customers.
Frequently asked questions
Can I store the time on site per unit?
Yes. You set the visit duration for each unit, and trakki works out the day with it. That way a 90-minute heating service and a 20-minute visual inspection fit into the same day.
What about units without a street address, such as pumping stations?
You set the position on the map by hand, once. After that trakki works out the drive time there as it does for any address.
Can my company see the jobs?
Only what you pass on: the Excel file with date, unit, address and note. It has one row for each visit you recorded, and for each phone call if you log those too. There is no access from outside, because there is no trakki server holding your data.