Scheduling 40 engineers: what each vendor actually claims

Three things called scheduling

A dispatch board

A human drags jobs onto engineers and the system stops them double-booking. Perfectly adequate up to the point where one dispatcher can hold the whole picture in their head, which most operations put somewhere between fifteen and thirty engineers.

Assisted routing

The system suggests an order, a travel time and a nearest-engineer answer, and the dispatcher accepts or overrides it. Commusoft describes drag-and-drop dispatch with intelligent routing as included in every plan; Joblogic puts Route Scheduling in its Premium tier.

An optimisation engine

The system generates the schedule against constraints and objectives, and a human handles exceptions. This is a separately licensed product almost everywhere it exists: Microsoft sells Resource Scheduling Optimization at £23.10 per resource per month; Eworks Manager sells Autoplanning and Smart Planning as add-on modules; Salesforce builds AI-powered scheduling and route optimisation into its £140 Dispatcher licence.

What the suppliers publish

• Salesforce Field Service. The Dispatcher licence is described as an intelligent dispatch console with AI-powered scheduling and route optimisation, real-time visibility into field operations and intelligent job assignment and reallocation, at £140 per user per month billed annually.
• Dynamics 365 Field Service. Scheduling and resource dispatching is a licensed feature and limited on the Contractor licence; the optimisation engine is the separate Resource Scheduling Optimization add-on.
• Commusoft. Drag-and-drop dispatch with intelligent routing in every plan, with the top tier pitched at organisations that need to mass schedule hundreds of jobs instantly.
• Joblogic. Job Planner in Standard, Route Scheduling and Engineer Tracking in Premium, with AI scheduling and dynamic routing described as marketplace apps.
• Klipboard. Schedule and dispatch on every tier, with advanced scheduling, multi-resource allocation and team assignment in Professional, and a timeline view by day, week and month.
• BigChange. Job scheduling and live tracking stated as included in all plans; the pricing page does not describe an optimisation engine.
• Eworks Manager. Smart Planning, Scheduled Dispatch and Autoplanning are optional modules rather than core, so scheduling capability here is a purchasing decision rather than a given.
• Oneserve. Scheduling and dispatch is one of three named system areas, aimed at social housing repairs and retrofit programmes.

Every claim above is what the supplier states on its own pages, read on 15 August 2026. None of it is a test result: we have not scheduled a single engineer with any of these products.

The test that separates them

Take one real bad day from your own history: the day with three emergencies, two sick engineers and an SLA that was going to breach at 4pm. Ask each shortlisted supplier to run that day in a proof of concept with your job types, your skills matrix and your travel geography. Watch specifically what happens to the schedule when you inject the second emergency at 11am. Every demo handles a clean morning. The reason to buy an optimisation engine is what happens to the afternoon.

Skills, geography and the parts van

Scheduling quality at scale is mostly a data problem rather than an algorithm problem. The engine needs to know which engineers hold which tickets, which sites need two people, what is on which van, and how long your jobs actually take rather than how long they are estimated to take. Whichever product you pick, the first six months of value comes from getting those four datasets right, and any supplier who tells you otherwise during a demo is selling the demo.