Smarter Technician Routing Cuts Drive Time and Lifts Daily Job Throughput

Any HVAC shop owner who has stood behind a dispatcher at 7 a.m. knows the problem. Six techs, 22 calls, three of them urgent, one of them requires a refrigerant certification the Tuesday guy doesn't have, and a couple of jobs in the north end nobody wants to drive to. The hard part isn't drawing lines on a map — it's matching the right skills to the right jobs while the clock runs. A 2024 study in the European Journal of Operational Research tackles exactly that matching problem, and its conclusion is less obvious than you'd expect.

Authors Maciej Nowak and Przemysław Szufel model technician routing and scheduling for the sharing economy: a pool of independent, home-based technicians with different skill sets, coordinated by a central service platform that assigns jobs and routes across multiple planning periods. They frame it as a Markov decision process and develop a heuristic that approximates routing cost so the model can be solved at realistic problem sizes. The objective is to minimize the cost of serving demand — not to chase a particular drive-time percentage.

Their headline finding cuts against a common assumption. The benefit of cross-training technicians has real limits, and in most circumstances it is more cost-efficient to deploy technicians with focused areas of expertise. In other words, a platform (or a shop) that tries to make every tech do everything tends to do worse, on cost, than one that leans into specialization and matches specialists to the work they're best at. That's the paper's actual contribution: not a routing-software performance claim, but a workforce-composition insight.

Everything below the next heading is ServiceMag's own operational read on how that insight applies to a dispatcher-run residential shop. We've flagged where our illustrative numbers are ours and not the study's.

Why Most Shops Leave Money on the Road

A typical residential HVAC dispatcher plans routes by geography and appointment time. That's the basic layer. Skill matching usually gets handled by labeling "senior" versus "junior" techs and trying to send the right one. None of this is wrong, but it leaves efficiency on the table compared to scheduling that treats skill match and time windows as first-class constraints rather than afterthoughts.

The gains show up in two places. First, drive time. Routes that consider skill and time windows alongside geography tend to cluster tighter, which cuts windshield time. Second, completed jobs per day — fewer reassignments mid-morning because the dispatched tech didn't have the right certification or the customer wasn't home.

For a shop paying California tech labor at 50-plus dollars an hour loaded, even a modest reduction in drive time and a fraction of an extra job per tech per day is material over a month. To make that concrete: a 10-percent cut in drive time and roughly half an extra job per tech per day is the kind of order-of-magnitude payoff that's worth chasing. Those numbers are ServiceMag's own illustrative estimate, not a result from Nowak and Szufel — their study minimizes scheduling cost and does not report drive-time or jobs-per-day figures. What the research does tell you is where the structural leverage sits: in matching focused expertise to demand rather than spreading skills thin.

What a Small Shop Actually Does With This

You don't need to build your own solver. Most modern field service platforms — ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, FieldEdge, and the major BMS integrators — now offer constraint-aware routing. The question is whether your shop has actually configured those features or is using the platform as a glorified calendar.

The two practical moves. First, build out a skill matrix in whatever dispatch platform you run. Every tech's certifications, brand training, and specialty work, tagged at the technician level. This is also where the study's lesson lands directly: if focused expertise is what pays off, you want the system to know precisely who specializes in what, so it can route specialists to the jobs that need them. Second, define your time windows honestly. Customers who say "anytime" and customers who say "before 2 p.m. or I'm not home" shouldn't carry the same dispatch weight. The routing engine can't optimize constraints it doesn't see.

A staffing corollary follows from the same finding. When you hire and develop techs, resist the reflex to cross-train everyone into generalists. The research suggests that for a lot of demand mixes, a roster of focused specialists is more cost-efficient than a roster of jacks-of-all-trades — so think about skill coverage at the team level rather than trying to maximize what each individual can do.

Dispatchers who bring years of shop knowledge aren't going away. The research isn't replacing them. It's giving them — and the people who staff the shop — a clearer way to think about which mix of skills, matched to which jobs, actually keeps cost down.

More on the operations side: fleet management for appliance repair and our contractor software reviews expansion.

Source

Nowak, M., & Szufel, P. (2024). "Technician routing and scheduling for the sharing economy." European Journal of Operational Research, 314(1), 15–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2023.09.023