Dispatch is where a junk removal day is won or lost, usually before the trucks leave the yard. Send a two-person crew to a hot tub teardown and they will be there all afternoon. Send a pickup and trailer to a full basement cleanout and they will be making three dump runs. Put a crew on the far side of town when the same-day job is two streets from another truck, and the day leaks hours. This post is about assigning work: deciding which crew and truck take which job, building the morning board, handling the changes that always come mid-day, and keeping track of where everyone is without calling them every hour.
Size the crew to the job
Junk jobs vary more than almost any other outdoor service. A single couch from a driveway is a 20-minute job for two people. A hoarded garage, a hot tub removal or a shed demolition can take a full day for three.
Before assigning anything, sort the day's jobs by what they need. Light curbside pickups and single items can go to a two-person crew working a long list. Heavy items like pianos, safes and appliances on stairs need at least two strong people and the right dollies. Demolition jobs need tools, more time and sometimes a third person. Big cleanouts may need a full day and a second truck.
Put what each job needs in the job notes when you book it: "basement, narrow stairs, two people minimum" or "shed teardown, bring the saw and the sledge." The crew sees those notes in the crew app, and the person dispatching sees them when building the day.
Match the truck to the load
If you run more than one kind of vehicle, the truck matters as much as the crew. A box truck holds more volume and keeps loads out of the weather. A dump trailer is faster to unload at the transfer station and handles brush, dirt and demolition debris better. A pickup is fine for a few single items.
Think about how much each truck will haul in the day. If a truck's jobs add up to more than one full load, plan the dump trip in the middle of the route, not at the end. A truck that is full by 11 a.m. with three jobs left wastes time if it has to backtrack to the dump.
For lawn companies, the dump trailer you already pull for landscape work is often the right tool for yard debris and storm cleanup jobs. Assign those to a lawn crew on a light day instead of tying up your main junk truck.
Build the morning board the night before
The best dispatch happens the afternoon before. Look at tomorrow's jobs, group them by area, assign them to trucks, and let auto-routing put each truck's stops in order by distance. In IndustryBossPro, you assign jobs to a truck and day, and the crew sees their route in order in the crew app with navigation to each stop.
Leave some slack. A truck that is booked to the minute will run late by mid-morning, because junk jobs are rarely exactly what the photos showed. Many dispatchers leave an hour or so of open time per truck for overruns and same-day calls.
Send the night-before texts so customers know their window. If a customer needs to be home or leave a garage open, that text is what gets it done, and it saves a wasted trip.
Handling the changes that always come
Something changes almost every day. A job is bigger than quoted and takes an extra hour. A customer cancels. A same-day call comes in across town. A truck gets a flat.
The dispatcher's job is to make one decision quickly and tell everyone. If a job runs long, push the next stops back and let the customers know with an on-the-way text when the crew actually heads over. If a stop cancels, look at the waiting jobs to see if one nearby can fill the hole. If a truck goes down, move its jobs to another truck where they fit and reschedule the rest. Rescheduling a day sends each affected customer a reschedule text.
The same-day scheduling post covers how to fit new jobs in without breaking the rest of the day.
Knowing where the crews are
A dispatcher who has to call every crew to find out where they are wastes time and interrupts the work. The crew app shows the office the GPS location of each crew phone during the day, so you can see which truck is closest to a new job or which one is running behind.
The crew app also shows progress as stops get marked done, with photos and notes attached. If a crew skips a stop, they pick a reason, such as customer not home or items not out, so the office knows whether to reschedule or call the customer.
Clock-in and clock-out times from the crew app feed the time clock, which matters later when you look at what each job really cost. The mobile app page covers what crews see on their phones.
Look back at the end of the day
Spend ten minutes after the trucks are back. Which jobs ran long, and why? Was the crew too small, the truck wrong, or the estimate off? Did any truck make an extra dump trip that better planning could have avoided? Were there gaps where a truck was waiting with nothing to do?
Job costing shows planned hours against actual for each job, and labor cost from the crew's clock-in times. Over a few weeks, you will see patterns: certain kinds of jobs that always run over, crews that are faster on heavy work, and areas that are always a long drive. Use them to dispatch better next week. Write what you learn into the job notes for repeat customers, so the next dispatcher knows that building needs three people or that driveway cannot fit the box truck. For the route side of the same problem, see route planning for junk trucks.
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