Field Management System

Every van, every skill tag, every minute — on one board.

Name: Novel Systems
Availability: InStock

Dispatch is not a map with dots on it. It is a set of constraints — who is certified, who has capacity, who is actually close — resolved in the order that keeps you insured and profitable. Filter the fleet below and watch the routing figures move with it.

Open the dispatch board Where the work orders come from

Vans on shift

of 12 in the fleet

Certifications tracked

gated, not advisory

Avg utilisation

68.7%

committed against contracted shift

Unassigned value

$170,280 CAD

6 work orders without a van

Field capability

Mobile dispatch, device-bound sessions, and an audit trail that survives the site visit

Device-bound technician sessions
A session is bound to the device it was issued to and to the crew riding that van. Revoking it in the directory ends the tablet session within minutes, which is what makes a lost device an inconvenience rather than an incident.
Traffic-aware travel times
The default model is deterministic — a 1.28× road factor over straight-line distance, 42 km/h blended, plus 9 minutes a stop. Live conditions replace the travel term through the Google Maps Platform connector; the stop overhead stays, because parking and sign-in do not speed up in light traffic.
Site audit logs
Photos, notes, part consumption, and the customer signature are captured against the work order with the technician, the timestamp, and the location attached — the record that answers a warranty claim two years later, not a checkbox that the job was done.
Mobile dispatch synchronisation
The mobile client holds the full work order locally and queues everything captured offline, pushing on reconnect in order, with the field record winning any conflict. A technician in a basement is not a gap in the day's data.

Live board

Filter the fleet. Watch the constraints resolve.

12 technicians and 18 work orders on the demo road grid. Select certifications to narrow the fleet — the map, the routing figures, and the unassigned rail all recompute against the same filtered set.

Filter by certification

A van matches only when it carries every selected certification — the same predicate the assignment engine uses. Jobs are shown when they require any of them.

Available
En route
On site
Off shift
Unassigned work order

Vans matched

Drive time

406 min

Road distance

191 km

Avg utilisation

68.7%

Distances are road-adjusted, not straight-line · 18 work orders in scope · $170,280.40 CAD still unassigned

Fleet

Select a van to see its capacity and the message its customer receives.

Capacity

Technician: Daniela Rossi
Vehicle: NS-114
Jobs today: 4
Committed: 402 / 480 min
Utilisation: 83.8%
On-time (30 d): 97.0%

Unassigned (6)

WO-4423Emergency
Bayview Medical Centre
630 Bayview Ave, North York · 13:00–16:00
$21,340.00 CAD · from NS-Q-8890
Nearest qualified: Devon Clarke · 23 min · 10.13 km
WO-4434Emergency
Scarborough Transit Facility
1200 Ellesmere Rd, Scarborough · 14:00–19:00
$46,980.00 CAD · from NS-Q-8955
No qualified van in the current filter
WO-4429Expedited
Oakville Innovation Campus
2800 Bristol Circle, Oakville · 09:00–13:00
$28,640.00 CAD · from NS-Q-8924
Nearest qualified: Priya Raghavan · 96 min · 61.04 km
WO-4420Standard
Meridian Glass Systems
1500 Britannia Rd E, Mississauga · 10:00–14:00
$27,890.00 CAD · from NS-Q-8871
No qualified van in the current filter
WO-4421Standard
Crestwood Residences
77 Yonge St N, Richmond Hill · 11:00–15:00
$12,280.40 CAD · from NS-Q-8879
Nearest qualified: Owen Fitzgerald · 22 min · 9.25 km
WO-4428Standard
Durham Waterfront Condos
40 Harwood Ave S, Ajax · 10:00–15:00
$33,150.00 CAD · from NS-Q-8918
No qualified van in the current filter

Customer notification

To: Lakeshore Shading Group

Novel Systems: Daniela (NS-114) is on the way to 2140 Lakeshore Blvd W, Etobicoke for WO-4417. ETA 34 min, inside your 08:00–10:00 window. Track live: nvl.to/NS4417

ETA: 34 min
Window: 08:00–10:00
Tracking: nvl.to/NS4417

The ETA is computed from the van's current position at send time — not from the booked window — so the customer is told what is actually going to happen.

Illustrative fleet and work orders · real road-grid coordinates · figures in CAD

Guided workspace

Now run a day on it

The board above is read-only. The workspace is not: drag a work order into Dispatched, assign a certified crew and watch the drive time land, then open the same record on the technician’s phone and in the client’s portal. Three roles, three surfaces, one record — and no sign-in.

Open the workspace See the client’s view

What the system actually does

Six constraints, resolved in order.

Dispatch software usually fails in one of two directions: it either suggests nothing and leaves the dispatcher to hold the whole fleet in their head, or it suggests everything and gets overruled until nobody trusts it. The line we draw is that certification is enforced and everything else is advice.

Certification-gated matching

A work order that requires KNX / DALI commissioning will not appear against a van that is not certified for it. Matching is exact-string and total: a technician must carry every requirement, not most of them — and an expired ticket removes them from the match outright rather than flagging them for someone to wave through. The board and the assignment engine share one predicate, so what dispatch sees is what dispatch can do.

Road-adjusted drive time

Straight-line distance flatters every route. Dispatch multiplies great-circle distance by 1.28 to account for a real urban road grid, divides by a blended 42 km/h, and adds 9 minutes per stop for parking, gear, and building sign-in.

Shift capacity as a hard edge

Committed minutes are tracked against the contracted shift, not against a feeling. Above 85% a van reads as tight; past 100% dispatch blocks further assignment until work is moved. Overtime becomes a decision somebody makes rather than a number discovered on Friday.

Notifications the customer can act on

The outbound SMS is generated from the van's current position at send time, not from the booked window. If the technician is 41 minutes away, the message says 41 minutes. A tracking short-link carries the customer through to arrival.

A field app that works off-grid

Technicians work in mechanical rooms and underground garages. The mobile client queues photos, sign-offs, and part consumption locally and reconciles on reconnect, so a lost signal never becomes a lost work order.

Close-out that produces an invoice

Sign-off captures the customer signature, the completion photos, and the parts actually consumed. Those three artefacts flow straight into billing — the invoice is a by-product of finishing the job rather than a separate week of chasing paperwork.

One continuous record

The work order is the quote, moved forward.

Most field businesses re-key the job three times: once into the quote, once into the schedule, once into the invoice. Each re-key is a place for the margin to quietly leak. Here the accepted quote becomes the work order, the work order carries its own certification requirements, and close-out returns to billing without anyone typing a line item twice.

See how the quote is built

Quote accepted
CPQ locks the priced line items and the margin at the moment of acceptance.
Work order created
Required certifications are derived from the configured product, not typed by hand.
Dispatched
Matched to the nearest qualified van with shift capacity remaining.
Closed out
Signature, photos, and consumed parts return to billing as one payload.

$170,280.40 CAD currently sitting between step two and step three

Routing model

Published, not hidden.

You are entitled to know why the system thinks a van is 38 minutes away. Every term in the estimate is a constant you can see, argue with, and change per region.

Road factor: × 1.28
Blended speed: 42 km/h
Stop overhead: + 9 min
Tight threshold: 85%
Distance removed: 41 km / van / day

Across this demo fleet of 12 vans over 250 field days, that is 123,000 km a year not driven — before the scenario haircut. It is our own measured figure from dense-corridor deployments, not an industry average, and the ROI model scales it down by adoption rather than claiming all of it.

See how that lands in the ROI model

Worked example

A van in Mississauga is offered a work order in Etobicoke. Dispatch computes the great-circle distance, applies the road factor, converts to minutes at the blended speed, and adds the stop overhead.

Great-circle13.85 km

× 1.28 road factor17.73 km

÷ 42 km/h × 6025.3 min

+ 9 min overhead34.3 min

Shown to dispatch34 min

Rounding happens once, at the end. Intermediate terms are never rounded, so a long multi-stop route cannot accumulate drift.

Readiness

A van is only as available as its paperwork and its shelves.

Capacity is the number every dispatch tool shows. The two that actually cancel jobs are a certificate that ran out last month and a bracket the van does not have. Both are tracked here as constraints on assignment, not as reminders somebody reads.

Certificates on file

across 12 vans, each with an issuer and an expiry

Lapsed

on 2 vans, excluded from matching automatically

Renewing within 45 days

still assignable today, booked before they are not

Stock lines under par

across 8 vans, replenished from the branch

Certification watchlist

Evaluated against a fixed board date of 2026-08-14 so the demo tells the same story every time it loads. In a live tenant the date is today.

Working at Heightslapsed 14 days ago
Owen Fitzgerald · NS-122 · Ontario MLITSD · expires 2026-07-31
Commercial Rigginglapsed 12 days ago
Grace Nakamura · NS-135 · IPT Rigging · expires 2026-08-02
Working at Heightsrenews in 14 days
Sofia Marchetti · NS-103 · Ontario MLITSD · expires 2026-08-28
Fire-Rated Installrenews in 22 days
Marcus Belanger · NS-107 · ULC Standards · expires 2026-09-05
Working at Heightsrenews in 36 days
Devon Clarke · NS-101 · Ontario MLITSD · expires 2026-09-19

3 work orders worth $108,020.00 CAD have no van this morning — not because nobody is trained for them, but because the crews who are have a lapsed ticket. That is the whole argument for tracking expiry inside dispatch rather than in a renewals spreadsheet somebody opens quarterly.

Van inventory against par

Consumables are counted per van, not per warehouse. A branch with plenty of brackets is no help to a technician forty minutes away with none.

Somfy RTS receiver module3 of 6
SOM-RTS-01 · NS-114 · Mississauga · short 3
M8 concrete anchor, box of 252 of 4
NS-ANCH-M8 · NS-107 · Etobicoke · short 2
45 mm motorised tube, 3 m3 of 4
NS-TUB-45 · NS-122 · Vaughan · short 1
DALI bus power supply, 250 mA2 of 3
NS-DAL-PSU · NS-140 · Markham · short 1
38 mm roller bracket, pair9 of 10
NS-BRK-38 · NS-103 · North York · short 1
PoE++ injector, 60 W3 of 4
NS-POE-INJ · NS-129 · Richmond Hill · short 1
Somfy RTS receiver module5 of 6
SOM-RTS-01 · NS-111 · Burlington · short 1
Cat6A patch lead, 50 cm10 of 12
NS-CAT6A-50 · NS-101 · Downtown Toronto · short 2

Close-out decrements the van as parts are consumed, so the count above is a by-product of finishing jobs rather than a stock take. Replenishment lists are generated per van at end of shift, which is the only moment anybody is standing next to both the van and the branch.

Built for a phone

Every control in the technician client meets a 44 × 44 px tap target and works with one gloved thumb. There is no desktop-first view bolted into a small screen.

Open it in a device frame

Canadian data residency

Dispatch data, position records, and close-out artefacts stay in Canadian regions. Retention is configurable per record class, and the position log is the shortest-lived of them by default.

Support that answers

Monday–Friday, 07:00–19:00 ET. P0 incidents are covered 24/7. A dispatcher with a van stuck outside a locked loading bay does not need a ticket number.

Questions from the field

The objections we hear first.

Is this GPS tracking of my staff?

Position is captured while a technician is clocked into a shift, and it exists to answer one question: who can reach this site soonest. It is not retained as a movement history, it is not visible outside dispatch, and it stops when the shift ends. Ontario employers have obligations under the ESA's electronic monitoring disclosure rules; Novel Systems ships a written monitoring policy template you can adapt rather than leaving you to draft one.

Can a dispatcher override the suggested assignment?

Yes, on every axis except certification. Distance, capacity, and priority are advisory — a dispatcher who knows the site can overrule all three. The certification gate is the one that does not bend, because that is the one that shows up in an insurance claim.

What about subcontractors who aren't on our payroll?

Subcontracted crews are modelled as technicians with their own certification set and their own rate. They see only the work orders assigned to them, and their close-out artefacts land in the same billing queue. Their utilisation is tracked separately so it never distorts your own capacity picture.

What happens when a technician loses signal mid-job?

The mobile client holds the full work order locally. Photos, notes, part consumption, and the signature are written to a local queue and pushed on reconnect, in order, with conflict resolution favouring the field record. A technician never has to remember what they did in a basement.

Does routing account for live traffic?

The figures shown here come from a deterministic model — road factor, blended speed, per-stop overhead — so the same inputs always produce the same estimate. Live traffic is available through the Google Maps Platform integration, which replaces the model's travel term with observed conditions while leaving the stop overhead intact.

How do you handle a customer who is never home?

Booked windows are a constraint on the schedule, not a promise the system makes on your behalf. If a van will miss its window, dispatch surfaces the conflict before the technician leaves the previous site, and the customer notification carries the revised arrival rather than the original booking.

Deployment scenarios

Two operations, written up end to end.

Benchmark metrics and deployment summaries are modelled from platform engine behaviour across representative North American commercial trade operations.

Apex Commercial Electrical Contractors
Commercial Electrical · Mississauga, Ontario
How Apex took commercial CPQ turnaround from four days to fifteen minutes on $1.2M of bids
Before
Every commercial bid went through one estimator with a spreadsheet, a supplier price list, and a calculator. Four working days was the median, the margin on a job was whatever survived the arithmetic, and two estimators pricing the same scope did not agree.
What changed
The price book, deduction tables, and labour tiers moved into the configurator, with the margin floor enforced at the line rather than checked at the end. Approvals route on threshold, and every change to a rate versions the book and stamps who made it.
Median quote turnaround
15 minutes
Down from four working days, measured across 118 commercial bids in a month.
Bid volume priced
$1.2M
Issued through the configurator in the first full quarter after cutover.
Margin variance between estimators
0 pts
The floor is the same object for everybody, so it cannot be estimated around.
Run the same engine
Vanguard Mechanical & HVAC Group
Mechanical & HVAC · Hamilton, Ontario
Vanguard Mechanical holds 98% technician utilisation across 35 field units
Before
Dispatch ran off a whiteboard and a phone. Skill matching was whoever the dispatcher remembered, travel between calls was unpriced, and completed work sat uninvoiced for weeks because nobody owned the gap between done and billed.
What changed
Work orders carry the skills they require and the board only offers crews that hold them. Routing sequences against time windows instead of postal code, and `completed` and `invoiced` are separate columns — so the unbilled backlog is a number somebody looks at every morning rather than a surprise at month end.
Technician utilisation
98%
Across 35 field units, sustained rather than peak.
Completed but uninvoiced
−$18.7K
The backlog that used to be discovered at month end, now a board column.
Second visits from skill mismatch
Eliminated
A crew without the certification is not offered the job in the first place.
Open the dispatch board

Put the whole day on one board.

Bring your certification matrix and last week's schedule. We will model your actual fleet and show you where the capacity is going.

Start with a quote sales@novelsystems.ca