Running the day

The board is the keystone: one row per driver per day, carrying their van, their route, their shift and their wave. Everything else points at it — a walk-round photo binds to a van and a driver and a day, an hour is checked against a limit, an invoice line comes off a route. Building it is one press, and the rest of the morning is the exceptions.

Before you build

The build reads three things, so all three want to be in place: the week published, the routes synced from Cortex, and each van’s bench set. None of them stops it — a board built without route demand is just a board that cannot tell you what it is short — but each one is a question you will otherwise answer by hand.

Building it

Dispatch

1. 1

   Pick the day and press Build the day.

   Every rostered driver gets a row. Each one is put on the van they are first call on, and where a wave or a shift was left blank it is filled from their pattern.

2. 2

   Read what it did about the vans.

   Where two of a van’s drivers are working the same day, the lower seat keeps it and the other is automatically moved into a free van — same size first — with the reason in words on their row. A van that cannot go out is not offered to the build at all, even one a person would be allowed to pick by hand.

3. 3

   Import the route sheets.

   Amazon’s route sheet PDF carries staging and bag counts but no names, so it lands on the board by route code. Sync the routes first or every route reports as not on the board.

4. 4

   Settle the gaps.

   Roles, vans, waves and routes edit on the row itself; on a phone the row opens as a sheet with the same options. Anything a van refuses says why — an open grounding issue, a service overdue, a restriction — rather than simply not appearing.

5. 5

   Press Send shift times.

   Every driver on the board gets their day on their phone: shift, wave, van, route, staging, bags and their line-up lane if your yard has them. This is the press that rings phones, and it can be set to go by itself on a timer if you would rather it did.

While the day runs

Packages and stops

Arrive from the sync as the day goes and land on the row, so the board is current without anybody retyping it.

Rescues and splits

Recorded from the row of the driver who needed help. Both the original status and the new one are kept, which is what makes the rescue analytics worth reading.

A rescue gets its own chat thread

With the meeting place in it and who to call when they are there.

Check-ins

A driver’s walk-round arrives as it is done. An answer can flag a van or raise a ticket without anybody retyping it.

Somebody sent home

The × on their row, which suspends them and clears the day. It does not touch the past.

What a board’s silence means