For the team deciding whether to automate dispatch at all
Are you ready to automate dispatch?
Seven questions about the shape of your operation, not about us. It answers one thing honestly, including when the answer is “keep doing it by hand”.
- No address needed to see your result
- Answered in your browser, sent nowhere
- Two of the four answers say “not yet”
Your operation
Nothing here is sent anywhere. A working week is five days — the only figure we supplied, used to turn your reassignments into a share of the work.
Run a shadow-mode pilot before you change anything.
Where that puts you
- Doing it by hand is still cheaper.
- Rules-based routing is the next step — write the vetoes down first.
- Run a shadow-mode pilot before you change anything.The operation is past what a board holds, but the rules are not written down anywhere — so a cutover would find them the expensive way, one angry customer at a time.
- A routing control plane is justified.
Why it said that
- Decisions a day420 jobs handed out, every day.
- Rules on each decision9 gating skills across 4 locations.
- People to choose between38 who could take the work.
- Someone has to be answeredA past decision has to be explained to somebody outside the team.
- Work that had to move60 reassignments a week — 3% of what you hand out.
What this is not
- It is not an ROI calculator.It does not tell you what you would save. Two of the four outcomes tell you not to buy anything yet, and that is the point of asking rather than a hedge.
- It is not a score we keep.The seven answers are computed in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you ask for the checklist below, and then all we get is the address.
- It is not a benchmark.Every threshold is a statement about the shape of an operation — whether the board still fits in one head, whether the rules exist outside it. We have not measured your industry and there is no average hidden in it.
Take the four-week shadow checklist
One printable page, written for the person who has to run it — including the single finding that means stop.
What you get
- Four phases — before you start, mirror, compare, cut over one slice
- Tick rows you can run off and take into the room
- The stop condition, stated plainly rather than buried
- One page, printable, no branding you have to explain
It lands in your inbox in about a minute. Nobody rings you unless you ask us to.
Or skip the form — the same page is readable and downloadable here. The offer is a convenience, not a gate.
Questions about the questions
How is the result worked out?
Five of your answers become a small score — how many decisions a day, how many people to choose between, how many rules gate each decision, how much work has to be moved afterwards, and whether anyone has to explain a past decision. The sixth answer, how you dispatch today, decides the top of the ladder: the same figures land on a shadow pilot when the rules live in somebody’s head and on a control plane when they are already written down.
Do you store my answers?
No. The arithmetic runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere. If you ask for the shadow-mode checklist at the end, we get the email address you typed and nothing else — not the answers, not the result.
Two of the outcomes tell me not to buy anything. Why?
Because for a lot of operations that is the true answer, and a tool whose every path ends in “you need this” is a lead form wearing a lab coat. Below roughly twenty-five jobs a day with a handful of people and no gating rules, a person and a board is cheaper than any software including ours.
What counts as a skill that “gates” the work?
One where handing the job to somebody without it is not allowed rather than not ideal — a gas certification, a licence, a language the customer contract requires, a security clearance. Preferences do not count: those change the ranking, not who is eligible, and they are not what makes dispatch hard.
What is shadow mode?
Running the engine beside your dispatchers on real work and throwing its answers away, so you can compare the two without changing anything anyone in the field sees. It is how you find the rules nobody wrote down, which is the expensive thing to discover after a cutover. There is a free four-week checklist at /guides/shadow-mode-checklist.
Is this specific to Fivexer?
No. The four outcomes are about your operation, not about our product — the assessment does not know what you would buy. Use it to decide whether to automate at all, then read the build-vs-buy guide, which names three cases where writing your own is the right answer.