Three trucks that stopped crossing town twice a day

Columbus is a ring road with a city in the middle, and a plumbing truck can spend its whole day going around it. Rivera Plumbing runs three vans out of a shop in Grandview and takes work from Powell down to Reynoldsburg — about 45 minutes of driving from one corner of the service area to the other.

For years the schedule was built by whoever picked up the phone. The caller asked for 10 AM, and 10 AM is what they got.

The cost of a polite yes

Sam Rivera worked it out on paper one February. Across three trucks, the shop was paying for about five hours of driving a day, and roughly two of those hours were avoidable — two jobs booked an hour apart on opposite sides of the outerbelt.

• Every avoidable hour is a job that could have been booked instead.
• A tech who arrives late has to apologize, and the review reflects it.
• Nobody could see the problem until the day had already happened.

Letting the calendar say no

Rivera turned on drive-time slots and did nothing else for two weeks. Arrive stopped offering a time when it could not get a truck there from the job before, which meant some callers saw 11:30 AM instead of 10 AM.

Almost none of them minded. The booking page shows the next three openings, and people take one.

I thought we would lose jobs by not saying yes to the time they asked for. We lost none. We gained two a day because the trucks stopped commuting.

Where it shows up

The median drive between two Rivera stops is now 18 minutes. Each truck drives about 1 hour 40 minutes less per day, and the shop books two more jobs a day than it did with the same crew.

Re-planning is the part Rivera did not know to ask for. When a main line clear turns into three hours, one tap texts every later customer the new window, and the afternoon stops being a series of phone calls made from a crawlspace.

What they would tell another crew

Set the buffer honestly. Rivera’s rush-hour buffer is 35 minutes and its mid-morning one is 15, because pretending they are the same number is how a day falls apart at 4 PM.