Why site days break dispatching
Most dispatch systems are built for discrete jobs: one pickup, one delivery, done. Earthworks and aggregate site days aren't like that. Six trucks running the same pit-to-site loop for ten hours is one continuous operation, and trying to manage it as six hundred individual jobs is how the board stops making sense by mid-morning.
The paper version of this is the scrap of paper on the sun visor: the route, the client, the site name, the rate. It works until the truck is needed on a different site, or a leg gets missed, or the client asks "how many loads have landed?" and nobody actually knows.
Plan the loop, not the load
The shift in thinking is small and everything depends on it: set up the day as a loop — pinned quarry, pinned site, pinned dump location — and let the loads fall out of it. Each cycle of the loop is a captured load: tonnage, docket photo, GPS stamp, attached to the client and the rate automatically.
- One setup. Name the site, pin the locations, assign the trucks. The loop is the job.
- Repetition is the feature. A repeating contract fires the same loop every day the site is live — no re-dispatching at 6am.
- Legs can't get lost. Because the loop is one job, the client invoice can't lose a leg. Every cycle is a billed load.
- The board stays readable. Instead of a wall of line items, the dispatcher sees trucks cycling through their loops — and can spot the truck that's stuck.
The morning plan
A well-run site day takes ten minutes to set up, not an hour of phone calls:
- Check the fleet. Who's available, who's on maintenance, who starts late — the board shows it before you plan around them.
- Set the loops. How many trucks on the pit-to-site run, which truck on the loader, what the dump leg is.
- Set the rates once. Per tonne for the cartage, per hour for the machine. The billing engine does the rest.
- Let the day run. Drivers see their cycles in the app. The office sees progress. The client, if you give them visibility, sees their site filling up.
The dispatcher's real job on a site day is watching for the truck that stops moving. The system's job is making sure that's the only thing to watch.
When the day goes sideways
It will — a truck breaks down, the site runs out of room, the loader operator is late. With loops on a board, re-planning is dragging one truck off one loop and onto another. The affected loads stay attached to the same client and rate, the driver's app updates, and the invoice still closes cleanly at the end of the week.
The takeaway
Site days are the bread and butter of cartage and civil work, and they punish job-by-job thinking. Set the loop once, capture every cycle, and let the billing follow the same structure. The day runs smoother, the invoice is complete, and the "how many loads have landed?" question has an answer that's always up to date.
