ElectricalBossPro Blog — Commercial Accounts

The Waiting List for Relamping Visits: Which Buildings Are Not Due, Due Now or Overdue

Once you have a handful of buildings on lighting maintenance plans, the question every Monday morning is the same: which ones need a visit this week? With three buildings, you can keep it in your head. With thirty, spread across two accounts and three parts of town, you need a screen that answers it at a glance. That screen is the Waiting List.

Where Due Visits Go

How recurring lighting plans are set up is covered in Commercial Lighting Maintenance Routes: Relamping Every 14 or 30 Days Without a Spreadsheet. Every one of those plans feeds the same place when a visit comes due.

In ElectricalBossPro the Waiting List is a live map and list of every visit that has come due across your whole company. Relamping visits on 14 or 30-day plans, yearly safety inspections on 365-day plans, yearly generator maintenance and anything else on a recurring plan all show up here. Every recurring visit across every account lands on the same map.

Three Colors, Three Decisions

Each pin on the map is colored by status:

• Not due yet. The building is still inside its cycle. Nothing to do, but it is useful to see what is coming next week.
• Due now. The building has reached its minimum days between visits and is ready to schedule.
• Overdue. The visit is past a 7-day grace period. This is the one the account will notice.

The colors turn the map into a to-do list. Overdue first, due now next, and not-due-yet buildings close to a due one can be pulled in early if it saves a trip.

The list view beside the map is handy when the office wants to work through due visits one at a time, by account or by part of town. The map is better for seeing the shape of the week. Most offices end up using both: the map to decide which buildings belong together, the list to make sure nothing was missed.

Seeing Buildings Together

The value of a map over a list is that it shows you clusters. A retail chain with stores along one highway, an apartment complex and a gym in the same part of town, three office buildings downtown. When their pins light up as due in the same week, the office can see that they belong on one route.

From the Waiting List, the office picks the buildings, assigns them to a van and a day, and they move onto the dispatch board. Auto-route orders them Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, and the office can move any stop by hand if a building needs to come first or last.

Mixing Commercial and Residential Due Visits

The Waiting List does not care whether a visit is commercial or residential. A homeowner's yearly safety inspection and a strip center's 30-day relamping visit both show up on the same map. That matters for shops that run one van on inspections and maintenance and another on service calls, because the maintenance van can fill its day from whatever is due nearby, house or building.

Saved views and the van filter on the dispatch board help the office look at just the commercial work when that is what they are planning. More on running both kinds of work together in A Van for the Buildings: Splitting Commercial and Residential Routes by Van.

What Happens When a Visit Is Done

When the tech taps Complete on a relamping visit, that visit is done. The plan starts counting again from that day, and the building's pin goes back to not due yet. When it reaches its minimum days again, it turns due now on its own.

If the tech has to skip a visit, say the store manager would not let them on the roof or the lot was full of cars, they tap Skip and note why. The office sees the skip and the reason and can reschedule it, and the building stays due until the work is actually done.

Keeping Accounts Off the Overdue List

The overdue color is a warning, not a failure. It gives the office a week of grace to catch up after a busy stretch or a run of bad weather. A few habits keep buildings from sitting there:

• Check the Waiting List at the same time each week, before building the routes.
• Schedule overdue buildings first, even if it means a slightly longer route.
• Pull not-due-yet buildings near a due cluster into the same trip when there is room.
• Reschedule skipped visits the same day the skip comes in.

One Screen for Every Cycle

The Waiting List replaces the spreadsheet, the wall calendar and the owner's memory with a map that updates itself. Every building, every cycle, every color. To see how it fits with the rest of the commercial tools, visit the commercial electrical software overview.