Validate the arrival on site to know the actual duration of the work order

Published on 10 May 2023 • Reading time: 4 min read

What is the actual time spent on site? As an operations manager, this information is particularly important to you. Defining the wrong duration when planning orders can lead to complaints from your customers and employees, not to mention the considerable impact on your profitability…
At AntsRoute, we know this too! That’s why, in order to avoid making mistakes, our team has just developed a new feature: the calculation of the actual duration of field services or deliveries on site.

To better define the duration of your different tasks and therefore better respect the arrival times communicated to customers, AntsRoute offers new double validation on the mobile application function.
In other words, your driver can validate his arrival at the work address, before validating the completion of the task.
Thanks to this double validation, AntsRoute allows you to compare the planned duration and the time actually spent on site for each work order. Thanks to this information, you can readjust the planned duration for your next appointments and thus boost your productivity.

Note: The feature is available to all users from the Lite offer.

Why know the actual duration of work orders?

The function for calculating the actual time spent on site offers many advantages to your company:

• You have reliable data for better decision-making.
• You can calculate more precisely the cost of each task, and therefore better define the price of your services.
• If you have overestimated this time, you will be able to carry out more work orders each day without increasing the working hours of your staff.
• If you have underestimated this time, you can readjust it to better respect the times when you visit your customers.

How to use this feature?

Step 1: Enable the option in the web interface settings

To access this feature from the mobile application, you must first activate the option from the settings of the AntsRoute interface. To do so, go to the “Settings” tab > “Mobile application settings”. From this page, you need to activate the option “Let your driver validate his/her arrival at the delivery address”.

Step 2: Validate the start of tasks from the mobile application

Once you have activated the function on your account, your drivers can access it from the mobile application.
To do this, as soon as your driver arrives at the work address, he must simply display the details of this task from the list of tasks and click on the “Start” button.

As you can see, thanks to this new feature, you can not only know the actual duration of your work orders, but you also have the possibility to view the ongoing tasks from the web interface. As on the mobile application, the ongoing tasks are displayed with a blue background and “Ongoing” badge in the “Monitor” module.

Note: The started task is displayed in the first position in the list on the mobile application.

The double validation of tasks from the AntsRoute mobile application.

Step 3: View the actual duration of work orders from the web interface

Once the driver has validated a task, you can view the actual duration of this work order from the web interface. To do this, you must go to the “Monitor” module and click on the “List of work orders” tab. In the “Duration” column, you can now see the actual duration next to the crossed-out planned duration.

The route tracking in AntsRoute.

To learn more about how to calculate the actual duration of work orders, read our support article.

Any questions? Do not hesitate to contact our support team by filling in our contact form. We would be happy to help you!