Dispatching: Pump Routing for the Septic Business

The septic business traditionally has been a customer demand-driven activity. A customer calls with a problem, such as:

• The back yard smells bad,

• The toilet is bubbling when they flush it,

• Water is coming into the basement,

• and so on.

How soon can you be here??

What these calls mean to the septic business is customer demand scheduling, i.e., the customer calls and you try to get there within four hours. Most septic businesses use this as a guide when developing their dispatching procedures: how, when and in what order to send out the trucks each day. This is great for your customer, but may not be so profitable for your business.

Most negative responses to this type of request cause the customer to go down the yellow pages and pick the next septic pumper and you will lose the sale. Unfortunately, being driven by customer demand scheduling is the most expensive way to run your company. It requires you to keep on hand equipment and drivers with free time to service these new calls, which is very, very expensive! Even if the drivers are not sitting in your shop, they are typically on the road with only a partial day’s work and we all know "how work expands to fill the available time".

Let me suggest that a septic business has several types of customers and that, by maintaining a proper mix, your business can be run more efficiently and with higher levels of profit. Let’s look at each of the several types of customers and estimate the time and business tools it takes to handle each type of service call.