PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Routes & Dispatch

Building a Day's Porta Potty Route From the Map in Minutes

Building a route used to mean a printout, a highlighter and a long phone call with the driver. It does not need to take that long. The previous article, Due, Overdue, Not Yet: Reading Pin Colors on a Porta Potty Route Map, covered what the map colors mean. Here is a practical, repeatable way to turn those pins into a day's route.

Step 1: Pick the Day and the Area

Start from your route plan. If Tuesday is the industrial park and downtown, open the Waiting List and look at that part of the map. You are not trying to schedule the whole service area; you are trying to fill one truck's day in one area.

If you have read Planning Porta Potty Service Routes That Hold Up All Week, you already have your areas. If not, start simple: one area per day per truck.

Step 2: Clear Anything Overdue

Look for overdue pins first, in this area and nearby. Each one goes on the route, even if it pulls the truck a little out of the way. Then add the due-now stops in the area. That is your core route.

Step 3: Add Deliveries and Pickups That Fit

Next look at deliveries and pickups. Ask two questions about each one:

• Can this truck carry it? A pump truck can usually handle a pickup of one or two Standard units with a trailer; it cannot deliver a Restroom Trailer.
• Is it close enough to the route that it costs less than sending another truck?

If the answer to both is yes, add it. If not, leave it on the Waiting List for the delivery truck or another day. The units on each stop are visible on the list, so you can tell before you assign.

Step 4: Assign to a Truck and Day

Select the stops and assign them to the truck and day. They move from the Waiting List to the Scheduled List, the dispatch board. On the board, jobs are grouped by day on a week strip, and you can filter by truck to see just this route.

Step 5: Set the Route Order

Now put the stops in order. You can auto-route Closest First or Furthest First from the yard, or drag stops by hand. For most service routes, auto-routing gets you close, and then you adjust a few stops:

• A site with a gate that opens at 9 goes later, not first.
• A school or a busy retail lot goes early, before people arrive.
• A delivery the customer needs by 10am moves up.

Closest First or Furthest First: Choosing Route Order From the Yard goes deeper on choosing between the two auto-route options.

Step 6: Check the Totals

The board totals the stops and dollars per service for the day. Look at both numbers. A route with 35 stops that is worth much less than a route with 22 stops might be full of low-price residential units spread out over a wide area. A route with only 12 stops might be fine if three of them are deliveries.

Compare the day against what the truck usually handles. If it is heavier than normal, move a few not-quite-due stops back to the Waiting List or onto another day. If it is light, look for due stops just outside the area that could join.

Step 7: Read the Notes Once

Before you send the route, scan the stops for notes that affect the order or the truck: placement notes like units behind the second building, gate codes, contact names, hours. The driver will see those notes on each card in the driver app, but the dispatcher should know about any stop that could stall the day.

Step 8: Let the Driver's Phone Do the Rest

Once the route is set, the driver sees the jobs in that order in the driver app, with navigation, units and notes on each card. Customers who have alerts turned on get the night-before text, and on the day, the driver app sends on-the-way and arrived texts automatically.

Step 9: Save Room for the Phone

Before calling the day done, look at whether one truck can absorb a same-day call. If every truck is loaded to the edge, the first emergency pump-out will push every stop after it late. Leaving a little slack on the truck nearest the busiest area is cheap insurance.

How Long Should This Take?

Once your areas are set and your service frequencies are right, building a day's route is mostly steps 2, 3 and 5. For an experienced dispatcher, that is a few minutes per truck. The time saved over a whiteboard is real, but the bigger gain is that nothing gets forgotten: anything you did not schedule is still sitting on the map.

For everything else that goes into planning and running routes, from truck splits to live GPS, see PortaPottyBossPro portable toilet route software.