Field service & healthcare
A missed appointment isn't a late parcel.
Someone took a morning off work. A patient is sitting at home waiting. Visit-based operations run on promises made to people, and a schedule that slips by forty minutes doesn't just cost kilometres — it costs the appointment. GoLoop plans days around the constraints that actually govern a visit: who is qualified to do it, how long it really takes, and the window you committed to.
- Unit of work
- A visit, not a drop
- Matched on
- Skills, qualifications and equipment
- Travel
- Road-accurate, not straight-line
What goes wrong
Optimising for distance breaks visit schedules.
In delivery, the driving dominates. In field service it often doesn't — a day can be four hours of travel and five hours of work. Plan it like a parcel round and the schedule looks tight and sensible right up until the second job over-runs, at which point every promised window behind it starts to fall over.
- Service durations vary from twenty minutes to half a day
- Straight-line travel estimates quietly under-run every leg
- One over-run cascades through every appointment behind it
- The wrong person gets sent, and the visit has to be booked again
Why distance-first planning fails here
A router that minimises kilometres will happily hand someone six jobs that are geographically tidy and collectively impossible, because it is scoring the driving and guessing at the work.
The binding constraint in a visit-based day is usually time on site and who is allowed to do the job — not the gap between stops. Plan the wrong thing and you get an elegant route nobody can complete.
The model
The right person, not the nearest one.
People carry qualifications
Each engineer or clinician is described by what they are certified and equipped to do, along with their shift, their base, and any breaks they are entitled to.
Jobs state what they demand
A visit declares the skills, certifications or equipment it needs, and the window it was booked into. These are requirements, not hints.
Only eligible people are considered
Someone without the qualification is never offered the job, however close they happen to be. Proximity breaks the tie between people who can actually do the work.
Sending the nearest available person is only efficient if they can complete the visit. Otherwise it is a wasted trip and a second appointment.
The day is mostly not driving
Time on site is the constraint.
Visit-based scheduling lives or dies on whether the plan reflects how long the work really takes.
Per-visit durations
Every job carries its own service time, so a two-hour installation and a fifteen-minute check are never treated as interchangeable stops.
Real travel times
Distances are road-accurate rather than straight-line, so the gaps between appointments are ones a person can actually drive.
Shifts and breaks
Working hours and entitled breaks are scheduled into the day rather than assumed away, so the plan is one somebody can legally and reasonably work.
Must-do versus nice-to-have
Visits can be marked mandatory or optional with priority tiers, so when a day is over-subscribed the right things get dropped instead of the last ones on the list.
What we need to know
GoLoop doesn't need to know who the patient is.
Routing is geography, timing and capability. To plan a visit GoLoop needs an address, a duration, a time window and the skills required — not a name, not a condition, not a case note. Personal and clinical details never have to enter the optimiser, which keeps the scheduling problem well away from your patient records and the obligations that come with them.
GoLoop is a planning engine, not a case-management or CRM system. It decides who goes where and in what order; your existing systems remain the record of who the visit is for and what happened on it.
Also handled
The awkward parts of a real week.
Read more about what GoLoop is built for.
Questions
Field service scheduling, answered plainly.
What is field service scheduling software?
It decides which technician or clinician attends which visit, in what order, and at what time — taking account of who is qualified, how long each job takes, the windows customers were promised, and the working hours and breaks of the people doing the work.
How is scheduling visits different from planning deliveries?
In a delivery round the driving usually dominates. In a visit-based day the time spent on site often exceeds the time spent travelling, and the person attending has to be qualified for the work. That shifts the binding constraint from distance to duration and capability.
Can GoLoop match jobs to specific skills or certifications?
Yes. Each person is described by the skills, certifications and equipment they carry, and each visit declares what it requires. Someone who does not hold the qualification is never assigned the job, regardless of how close they are.
Does it handle appointment windows customers were promised?
Yes. Windows can be hard, meaning they must be met, or soft, meaning missing them carries a penalty the solver weighs. Per-visit service durations mean the schedule reflects how long each appointment genuinely takes.
Does GoLoop need patient or customer personal data?
No. Planning needs an address, a duration, a time window and the skills required. Names, conditions and case notes are never required by the optimiser and are better kept in your own systems.
What happens when a visit over-runs or a job is added during the day?
The day can be re-planned from where people actually are, with completed visits locked and the remaining schedule rebuilt around the disruption. See mid-day re-planning for how that works.
Send us one real day.
The quickest way to see whether this holds up is to try it on your own operation. Send us one typical busy day — your people and your visits, as two spreadsheets — and we'll run it through GoLoop and send back the optimised schedule, plus the difference against how the day actually ran: travel time, visits completed, and windows met.
- Free, no install and no integration
- Back with you within five working days
- Anonymise the customer details — we only need real addresses
- Your file is used for this test only, and deleted within 30 days
Or email hello@building8.io directly, with your two spreadsheets attached.
Or request early access if you'd rather talk first.
A week with skill constraints, tight windows and a couple of over-runs tells us far more than a quiet one.