ServiceNow Field Service Management: Where Dispatch Logic Breaks and What Fixes It
A regional operations director at a lift maintenance company outside Milan called me in late September. They run around four hundred service engineers across northern Italy, Austria, and Slovenia, every one of them driving a van and carrying a laptop with the ServiceNow mobile agent on it. The platform had been live for fourteen months. Dispatch was broken. The specific complaint was that the automated scheduling engine was producing routes that engineers refused to run. Jobs that should have gone to the nearest qualified technician were landing with someone two hours further out. Priority tickets were being queued behind preventive maintenance visits. Customers were calling the service desk directly, bypassing the portal, because the portal said "scheduled for tomorrow" when the engineer was actually three days out. The operations director showed me a Monday dispatch screen with sixty-three jobs assigned to the automated solver and forty-one manually overridden. The dispatcher had become a human reconciliation layer between what the system said and what the engineers actually did.
