We have not posted for almost nine months and the reason is that we have been busy creating a new category for our mobile apps and a new back-end:
Job Dispatching
Our solution is designed to be flexible, covering different scenarios for the companies with a mobile force. The target market is:
- service companies (electrical, mechanical, cleaning, repairing, etc…)
- light transportation companies (picking up or distributing merchandise)
- food distribution companies
Why do we consider our solution better than the current systems for a dispatch manager ? Several reasons:
- real-time updates from workforce, split on a few levels
- job updates from the moment the workers are driving toward the location of the job
- updates from dispatch or from mobile workers is instantly reflected on the back-end monitoring application
- detailed job status with back-end analytics to understand workforce utilization
- workforce management (with vacations, off-hours, handled jobs)
- customer management (work orders, invoices)
- job dispatching based on matrix occupancy of the workforce and combined with map tools to pick an optimized distribution of the jobs
- time and location management of the mobile workforce
Our design was to create a native app (one for each market) in order to take advantage of existent APIs offered on the back-end. The criteria was to have a small code base and a fast app (versus a web-based app). Our apps continue to function even if there is no connectivity with the back-end for periods of times, support map natively, and many important functions (GPS locations, directions, data collections), are handled locally.
For the app to be functioning properly we added a few APIs at our toolbox – pushing jobs from the server, user monitoring and many other features embedded in a new back-end:
www.litedispatch.com
For now we will release an app with a reduced set of functions to be tested and then we will have ONLY a subscriber based type of service. The free version of the app will evolve in time but it will be limited by the number the features and users able to work under the same organization (for now it will be only two).
The purpose of the app is to dispatch, update jobs in real-time and also collect info about each mobile user (such as position, worker status, sensor readings, job status ). With every job there is a variable set of parameters that could be collected ( like signature, picture, audio, bar-codes, etc..) and all of them are synchronized with the back-end.
The back-end is, for now, based on an equal distribution type of dispatching and will help a dispatcher on scheduling jobs based on incoming requests.