Field Management System

Field service management software: every van, every skill tag, every minute — on one board.

Field service management is not a map with dots on it. It is a set of constraints — who is certified, who has capacity, who is actually close — resolved in the order that keeps you insured and profitable. Filter the fleet below and watch the routing figures move with it.

Open the dispatch board Where the work orders come from

Vans on shift

of 12 in the fleet

Certifications tracked

gated, not advisory

Avg utilisation

68.7%

committed against contracted shift

Unassigned value

$170,280 CAD

6 work orders without a van

Field capability

Mobile dispatch, device-bound sessions, and an audit trail that survives the site visit

Device-bound technician sessions
A session is bound to the device it was issued to and to the crew riding that van. Revoking it in the directory ends the tablet session within minutes, which is what makes a lost device an inconvenience rather than an incident.
Traffic-aware travel times
The default model is deterministic — a 1.28× road factor over straight-line distance, 42 km/h blended, plus 9 minutes a stop. Live conditions replace the travel term through the Google Maps Platform connector; the stop overhead stays, because parking and sign-in do not speed up in light traffic.
Site audit logs
Photos, notes, part consumption, and the customer signature are captured against the work order with the technician, the timestamp, and the location attached — the record that answers a warranty claim two years later, not a checkbox that the job was done.
Mobile dispatch synchronisation
The mobile client holds the full work order locally and queues everything captured offline, pushing on reconnect in order, with the field record winning any conflict. A technician in a basement is not a gap in the day's data.

Live board

Filter the fleet. Watch the constraints resolve.

12 technicians and 18 work orders on the demo road grid. Select certifications to narrow the fleet — the map, the routing figures, and the unassigned rail all recompute against the same filtered set.

Filter by certification

A van matches only when it carries every selected certification — the same predicate the assignment engine uses. Jobs are shown when they require any of them.

Available
En route
On site
Off shift
Unassigned work order

Vans matched

Drive time

406 min

Road distance

191 km

Avg utilisation

68.7%

Distances are road-adjusted, not straight-line · 18 work orders in scope · $170,280.40 CAD still unassigned

Fleet

Select a van to see its capacity and the message its customer receives.

Capacity

Technician: Daniela Rossi
Vehicle: NS-114
Jobs today: 4
Committed: 402 / 480 min
Utilisation: 83.8%
On-time (30 d): 97.0%

Unassigned (6)

WO-4423Emergency
Bayview Medical Centre
630 Bayview Ave, North York · 13:00–16:00
$21,340.00 CAD · from NS-Q-8890
Nearest qualified: Devon Clarke · 23 min · 10.13 km
WO-4434Emergency
Scarborough Transit Facility
1200 Ellesmere Rd, Scarborough · 14:00–19:00
$46,980.00 CAD · from NS-Q-8955
No qualified van in the current filter
WO-4429Expedited
Oakville Innovation Campus
2800 Bristol Circle, Oakville · 09:00–13:00
$28,640.00 CAD · from NS-Q-8924
Nearest qualified: Priya Raghavan · 96 min · 61.04 km
WO-4420Standard
Meridian Glass Systems
1500 Britannia Rd E, Mississauga · 10:00–14:00
$27,890.00 CAD · from NS-Q-8871
No qualified van in the current filter
WO-4421Standard
Crestwood Residences
77 Yonge St N, Richmond Hill · 11:00–15:00
$12,280.40 CAD · from NS-Q-8879
Nearest qualified: Owen Fitzgerald · 22 min · 9.25 km
WO-4428Standard
Durham Waterfront Condos
40 Harwood Ave S, Ajax · 10:00–15:00
$33,150.00 CAD · from NS-Q-8918
No qualified van in the current filter

Customer notification

To: Lakeshore Shading Group

Novel Systems: Daniela (NS-114) is on the way to 2140 Lakeshore Blvd W, Etobicoke for WO-4417. ETA 34 min, inside your 08:00–10:00 window. Track live: nvl.to/NS4417

ETA: 34 min
Window: 08:00–10:00
Tracking: nvl.to/NS4417

The ETA is computed from the van's current position at send time — not from the booked window — so the customer is told what is actually going to happen.

Illustrative fleet and work orders · real road-grid coordinates · figures in CAD

Guided workspace

Now run a day on it

The board above is read-only. The workspace is not: drag a work order into Dispatched, assign a certified crew and watch the drive time land, then open the same record on the technician’s phone and in the client’s portal. Three roles, three surfaces, one record — and no sign-in.

Open the workspace See the client’s view

What the system actually does

Six constraints, resolved in order.

Dispatch software usually fails in one of two directions: it either suggests nothing and leaves the dispatcher to hold the whole fleet in their head, or it suggests everything and gets overruled until nobody trusts it. The line we draw is that certification is enforced and everything else is advice.

Certification-gated matching

A work order that requires KNX / DALI commissioning will not appear against a van that is not certified for it. Matching is exact-string and total: a technician must carry every requirement, not most of them — and an expired ticket removes them from the match outright rather than flagging them for someone to wave through. The board and the assignment engine share one predicate, so what dispatch sees is what dispatch can do.

Road-adjusted drive time

Straight-line distance flatters every route. Dispatch multiplies great-circle distance by 1.28 to account for a real urban road grid, divides by a blended 42 km/h, and adds 9 minutes per stop for parking, gear, and building sign-in.

Shift capacity as a hard edge

Committed minutes are tracked against the contracted shift, not against a feeling. Above 85% a van reads as tight; past 100% dispatch blocks further assignment until work is moved. Overtime becomes a decision somebody makes rather than a number discovered on Friday.

Notifications the customer can act on

The outbound SMS is generated from the van's current position at send time, not from the booked window. If the technician is 41 minutes away, the message says 41 minutes. A tracking short-link carries the customer through to arrival.

A field app that works off-grid

Technicians work in mechanical rooms and underground garages. The mobile client queues photos, sign-offs, and part consumption locally and reconciles on reconnect, so a lost signal never becomes a lost work order.

Close-out that produces an invoice

Sign-off captures the customer signature, the completion photos, and the parts actually consumed. Those three artefacts flow straight into billing — the invoice is a by-product of finishing the job rather than a separate week of chasing paperwork.

One continuous record

The work order is the quote, moved forward.

Most field businesses re-key the job three times: once into the quote, once into the schedule, once into the invoice. Each re-key is a place for the margin to quietly leak. Here the accepted quote becomes the work order, the work order carries its own certification requirements, and close-out returns to billing without anyone typing a line item twice.

See how the quote is built

Quote accepted
CPQ locks the priced line items and the margin at the moment of acceptance.
Work order created
Required certifications are derived from the configured product, not typed by hand.
Dispatched
Matched to the nearest qualified van with shift capacity remaining.
Closed out
Signature, photos, and consumed parts return to billing as one payload.

$170,280.40 CAD currently sitting between step two and step three

Routing model

Published, not hidden.

You are entitled to know why the system thinks a van is 38 minutes away. Every term in the estimate is a constant you can see, argue with, and change per region.

Road factor: × 1.28
Blended speed: 42 km/h
Stop overhead: + 9 min
Tight threshold: 85%
Distance removed: 41 km / van / day

Across this demo fleet of 12 vans over 250 field days, that is 123,000 km a year not driven — before the scenario haircut. It is our own measured figure from dense-corridor deployments, not an industry average, and the ROI model scales it down by adoption rather than claiming all of it.

See how that lands in the ROI model

Worked example

A van in Mississauga is offered a work order in Etobicoke. Dispatch computes the great-circle distance, applies the road factor, converts to minutes at the blended speed, and adds the stop overhead.

Great-circle13.85 km

× 1.28 road factor17.73 km

÷ 42 km/h × 6025.3 min

+ 9 min overhead34.3 min

Shown to dispatch34 min

Rounding happens once, at the end. Intermediate terms are never rounded, so a long multi-stop route cannot accumulate drift.

Readiness

A van is only as available as its paperwork and its shelves.

Capacity is the number every dispatch tool shows. The two that actually cancel jobs are a certificate that ran out last month and a bracket the van does not have. Both are tracked here as constraints on assignment, not as reminders somebody reads.

Certificates on file

across 12 vans, each with an issuer and an expiry

Lapsed

on 2 vans, excluded from matching automatically

Renewing within 45 days

still assignable today, booked before they are not

Stock lines under par

across 8 vans, replenished from the branch

Certification watchlist

Evaluated against a fixed board date of 2026-08-14 so the demo tells the same story every time it loads. In a live tenant the date is today.

Working at Heightslapsed 14 days ago
Owen Fitzgerald · NS-122 · Ontario MLITSD · expires 2026-07-31
Commercial Rigginglapsed 12 days ago
Grace Nakamura · NS-135 · IPT Rigging · expires 2026-08-02
Working at Heightsrenews in 14 days
Sofia Marchetti · NS-103 · Ontario MLITSD · expires 2026-08-28
Fire-Rated Installrenews in 22 days
Marcus Belanger · NS-107 · ULC Standards · expires 2026-09-05
Working at Heightsrenews in 36 days
Devon Clarke · NS-101 · Ontario MLITSD · expires 2026-09-19

3 work orders worth $108,020.00 CAD have no van this morning — not because nobody is trained for them, but because the crews who are have a lapsed ticket. That is the whole argument for tracking expiry inside dispatch rather than in a renewals spreadsheet somebody opens quarterly.

Van inventory against par

Consumables are counted per van, not per warehouse. A branch with plenty of brackets is no help to a technician forty minutes away with none.

Somfy RTS receiver module3 of 6
SOM-RTS-01 · NS-114 · Mississauga · short 3
M8 concrete anchor, box of 252 of 4
NS-ANCH-M8 · NS-107 · Etobicoke · short 2
45 mm motorised tube, 3 m3 of 4
NS-TUB-45 · NS-122 · Vaughan · short 1
DALI bus power supply, 250 mA2 of 3
NS-DAL-PSU · NS-140 · Markham · short 1
38 mm roller bracket, pair9 of 10
NS-BRK-38 · NS-103 · North York · short 1
PoE++ injector, 60 W3 of 4
NS-POE-INJ · NS-129 · Richmond Hill · short 1
Somfy RTS receiver module5 of 6
SOM-RTS-01 · NS-111 · Burlington · short 1
Cat6A patch lead, 50 cm10 of 12
NS-CAT6A-50 · NS-101 · Downtown Toronto · short 2

Close-out decrements the van as parts are consumed, so the count above is a by-product of finishing jobs rather than a stock take. Replenishment lists are generated per van at end of shift, which is the only moment anybody is standing next to both the van and the branch.

Built for a phone

Every control in the technician client meets a 44 × 44 px tap target and works with one gloved thumb. There is no desktop-first view bolted into a small screen.

Open it in a device frame

Canadian data residency

Dispatch data, position records, and close-out artefacts stay in Canadian regions. Retention is configurable per record class, and the position log is the shortest-lived of them by default.

Support that answers

Monday–Friday, 07:00–19:00 ET. P0 incidents are covered 24/7. A dispatcher with a van stuck outside a locked loading bay does not need a ticket number.

Questions from the field

The objections we hear first.

Is this GPS tracking of my staff?

Position is captured while a technician is clocked into a shift, and it exists to answer one question: who can reach this site soonest. It is not retained as a movement history, it is not visible outside dispatch, and it stops when the shift ends. Ontario employers have obligations under the ESA's electronic monitoring disclosure rules; Novel Systems ships a written monitoring policy template you can adapt rather than leaving you to draft one.

Can a dispatcher override the suggested assignment?

Yes, on every axis except certification. Distance, capacity, and priority are advisory — a dispatcher who knows the site can overrule all three. The certification gate is the one that does not bend, because that is the one that shows up in an insurance claim.

What about subcontractors who aren't on our payroll?

Subcontracted crews are modelled as technicians with their own certification set and their own rate. They see only the work orders assigned to them, and their close-out artefacts land in the same billing queue. Their utilisation is tracked separately so it never distorts your own capacity picture.

What happens when a technician loses signal mid-job?

The mobile client holds the full work order locally. Photos, notes, part consumption, and the signature are written to a local queue and pushed on reconnect, in order, with conflict resolution favouring the field record. A technician never has to remember what they did in a basement.

Does routing account for live traffic?

The figures shown here come from a deterministic model — road factor, blended speed, per-stop overhead — so the same inputs always produce the same estimate. Live traffic is available through the Google Maps Platform integration, which replaces the model's travel term with observed conditions while leaving the stop overhead intact.

How do you handle a customer who is never home?

Booked windows are a constraint on the schedule, not a promise the system makes on your behalf. If a van will miss its window, dispatch surfaces the conflict before the technician leaves the previous site, and the customer notification carries the revised arrival rather than the original booking.

Deployment scenarios

Five workflows, written up end to end.

No named customers · every figure reproducible in the live engine

These are deployment scenarios describing how the platform handles each workflow, not case studies of named accounts. Novel Systems does not publish customer names or customer testimonials. Every pricing and dispatch figure shown is produced by the live engines and reproducible from the linked scenario.

Model constants — the margin floor, the quoting-time and route-distance assumptions — are revised when we get better evidence, so a figure here may differ from one you saved earlier. Every change to a published figure is listed with its date, and the old wording quoted, at /corrections. Read the corrections record.

SOC 2 Type II audit underway · PIPEDA compliant · Canadian data residency · ca-central-1 · SAML 2.0 single sign-on

Multi-trade general
Multi-Trade General
Commercial estimating, moved off spreadsheets
At the line
Margin check
Evaluated as the quote is assembled rather than reconciled once it is finished, which is the only point at which the cause of a breach is still visible.
Designed out
Line-item omissions
Assemblies carry their own components, so a missing line is a template change rather than an oversight.
No re-keying
Quote to work order
An executed proposal produces the field work order from the same record.
Implementation scope
- CPQ Engine
- Proposal & E-Signature
- FMS Dispatch Board
The problem
Estimating on legacy spreadsheets holds labour rates in one place, looks material costs up somewhere else, and cross-checks margin by hand at the end. Complex mixed electrical and HVAC assemblies are where that arrangement shows, because they are the ones with the most lines to get wrong.
Run the same engine
Mechanical contracting
Mechanical & HVAC
Email approval chains replaced by threshold routing
Routed, not chased
Exception handling
Out-of-threshold quotes go to the owner of that threshold automatically.
Issue directly
In-policy bids
A bid inside the threshold does not wait for a review it does not need.
Written as it happens
Revision history
Every change to a bid is attributed and timestamped in one place.
Implementation scope
- Approval Routing
- CPQ Engine
- Proposal & E-Signature
The problem
Multi-trade bids reviewed over email between project managers and senior leadership stall waiting on a signature. That is expensive in a competitive tender, where the deadline is fixed and the review time is not.
See the approval thresholds
Industrial services
Industrial Services
Field scope changes priced where they are discovered
At source
Scope capture
Changes are recorded on site rather than reconstructed from paperwork later.
Before the work
Client authorisation
The revision is agreed at the point of change instead of argued at invoice time.
Not a step
Job-close reconciliation
There is no separate pass to match field paperwork against the original estimate.
Implementation scope
- Field Mobile
- CPQ Engine
- Customer Portal
The problem
Scope changes found on site get captured on paper tickets or by text message, then reconciled against the original estimate back at the office. Work that was genuinely done goes unbilled, and what does get billed is open to dispute because the authorisation was informal.
Open the dispatch board
HVAC service & replacement
Mechanical & HVAC
Equipment replacement quoted without leaving the site
Same price book
Pricing authority
The field quote is built from the office rate card, not a technician's estimate.
During the visit
Proposal
Assembled on the device, against the same engine and margin floor as an office bid.
Not required
Second trip to quote
The diagnostic visit and the proposal are the same visit.
Implementation scope
- Field Mobile
- CPQ Engine
- Proposal & E-Signature
The problem
A technician attends a commercial diagnostic, takes notes, and calls the office. A quote follows a day or two later, by which point a faster competitor has sometimes already been and gone. The delay is administrative, not technical.
See the field workflow
Commercial electrical
Commercial Electrical
Every estimator on one live rate card
One rate card
Pricing source
Shared across the estimating team rather than held per estimator.
Blocked at entry
Out-of-policy discounting
Refused where it is applied instead of found afterwards, if it is found.
Readable against their rates
Historic bids
A quote can be read back against the rate version current when it was priced.
Implementation scope
- CPQ Engine
- Approval Routing
The problem
When each estimator keeps a private pricing spreadsheet with its own discount habits, material price increases reach some of those files and not others. Two estimators can quote the same scope differently and neither knows which one is current.
Price against the rate card

Put the whole day on one board.

Bring your certification matrix and last week's schedule. We will model your actual fleet and show you where the capacity is going.

Start with a quote sales@novelsystems.ca