Daily Dispatch Assignment Recommender: Fill the Board in Minutes, Not an Hour
Turn a pile of open work orders and your tech roster into ranked, explained assignment suggestions — who's the best tech for each job by skill, zone, availability and priority — with your dispatcher approving every assignment before the board is published or exported to your FSM.
A web tool where you import the day's open work orders and your tech roster, and for each unassigned job the app ranks your technicians with a plain-English reason for each suggestion, flags jobs that have no qualified tech, and lets your dispatcher approve or reassign each one. Only approved assignments are published to the board and exported as a clean CSV your field-service software can ingest — and the same WO can never be assigned twice.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- Your open work orders as a CSV/sheet
- Your tech roster with skills, zones and shift hours as a CSV/sheet
- Your assignment priorities (what matters most: skill match, distance, balanced load, urgency)
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Every morning you stare at a board full of open work orders and a roster of technicians, and you play the same hour-long puzzle: who has the right skill for this job, who's already working that side of town, who's actually on shift today, and which jobs are on fire and have to go out first. You hold half of it in your head. The new coordinator holds none of it. When someone is out sick or a priority call lands at 8:05, the whole board shuffles and you start over.
Get the match wrong and the costs are real: a tech rolls 40 minutes across town past a job they could have taken, a licensed task lands on someone who isn't certified for it, your best people get overloaded while others sit, and a high-priority customer slips because nobody flagged it. The knowledge of "who's good at what and where" lives in one or two people's heads, so when they're out, dispatch grinds. You don't need a six-figure scheduling engine and you don't need to be a developer to fix this.
What you'll build
A simple internal web tool for daily dispatch. You import the day's open work orders (job type, required skill, location/zone, priority, time window) and your tech roster (skills/certs, home zone, shift hours, current load) from a sheet or CSV. For each unassigned work order, the tool ranks your technicians and shows a plain-English reason for each suggestion — "Skilled for HVAC, in Zone 3, on shift until 5, lightest load today." It respects your hard rules: it won't suggest a tech who lacks a required skill, is out of zone, or is off shift, and it flags any job that has no qualified tech so you can see it instead of missing it.
Nothing is ever auto-assigned. Your dispatcher reviews each recommendation and clicks Assign — or overrides and picks someone else, with a note. Only approved assignments land on the published board, and the day's assignments export as a clean CSV in the exact columns your field-service management (FSM) software expects. A duplicate guard keyed on the work-order ID means the same job can never be assigned twice, even if two coordinators are working the board at once.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your current dispatch process and who runs it, where your work orders and roster live today, the exact field names and codes in your data (job types, skill/cert codes, zone names, priority levels), your typical and peak daily volumes, what "best tech" actually means to you (skill match vs. drive distance vs. balanced load vs. urgency), and the messy edge cases like split shifts, overtime, multi-skill jobs, and a tech who covers two zones. Then it tailors the scoring rules, the data model, and every later build step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything.
From there it walks the agent through importing the work orders and roster, building the recommendation engine with visible reasons, the no-qualified-tech flag, the dispatcher review-and-assign screen, the published board, and the FSM CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build and run the whole thing today even with no live integration to your FSM.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This is the part a spreadsheet can never give you, and it's built in from the start:
- Login so only your dispatch team can open the tool.
- Row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's work orders and roster.
- A complete audit trail — every suggestion shown, every assignment approved or overridden, who did it and when, with the dispatcher's override note captured.
- A hard human-in-the-loop gate: the AI only ever recommends. A dispatcher must click Assign before anything reaches the published board or the FSM export. Nothing is auto-assigned, ever.
- A duplicate guard keyed on the work-order ID so the same job can't be assigned twice.
Who it's for
Dispatchers, service coordinators, and operations managers at any field-service shop — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, facilities, pest control, IT field, appliance repair — who fill a daily board by hand and want the matching done in minutes, with the reasoning shown and a human still making every call.
You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor it to your shop.