The True Cost of Windshield Time (and How to Cut It)

Windshield time, the hours your technicians spend driving instead of working, is one of the largest hidden costs in any field service business. It burns fuel, wages, and capacity all at once, and most owners have no idea how much it is costing them.

Measure it before you fix it

You cannot improve what you do not track. Start by measuring the average drive time between jobs and what percentage of the workday is spent on the road versus on site.

Cluster jobs by geography

The fastest way to cut drive time is to stop sending techs across town for back-to-back jobs. Group appointments by area so each tech works a tight cluster instead of zig-zagging the map.

• Offer customers arrival windows that let you batch nearby jobs together.
• Assign jobs to the closest qualified tech, not just the next available one.
• Build routes that minimize backtracking across the service area.

The one-more-job math

Shaving 30 minutes of driving off each tech's day can free up enough time for an extra job several days a week. Across a full crew over a year, that is a substantial amount of revenue from miles you are already not billing for.

Let software do the routing

Manual scheduling cannot optimize a full day of jobs across multiple techs. Automated route planning consistently finds efficiencies a dispatcher working from memory simply cannot.