Start with one ordinary morning
Imagine it's 7:30 a.m. The office computers are unavailable, and the first crew is waiting for its assignment. This is a planning exercise, so leave everything running. Sit down with your dispatcher and someone who works in the field. Pick a typical job and talk through how you'd get it started.
Give yourselves 20 minutes. The goal is to find the first point where work gets stuck, then assign someone to fix it. A short list of real gaps is more useful than a long plan nobody has tried.
Find the information that gets a crew out the door
Can someone reach today's schedule from an approved device outside the office? Can they find the job address, site contact, assigned technician and scope of work? For an inspection or service visit, check which current drawings, forms and previous records the technician actually needs.
Ask someone to demonstrate the access. 'It's in the cloud' doesn't answer whether the person has a working login, the right permissions and a way to complete multifactor authentication. An office computer outage, an internet outage and a field-service application outage may each need a different fallback.
If you keep an emergency copy of the schedule, name who updates it and how staff know when it was last refreshed. Limit it to necessary information, restrict access and follow your retention rules. Don't copy customer records into personal email accounts just to make them easier to reach.
Check how calls and changes would reach the crew
Where do calls to the main business number go if the office is unavailable? Who can activate the approved fallback, and can a second person do it? Agree who tells customers about delays and who sends revised assignments to technicians.
Choose one temporary place to record schedule changes. If three people make separate lists, someone has to reconcile them later. Name that person now, including who enters completed work and customer updates when the normal system returns.
Know which work needs to wait
Getting a truck moving doesn't mean the technician has everything needed to complete the job. Ask your operations lead which work can continue with the information available and which needs to pause. Missing required records, instructions or authorization shouldn't become an improvised workaround.
Keep this exercise focused on dispatch and information access. Decisions about performing fire protection work still belong to the qualified people responsible for that work.
Ask your IT provider to show the recovery path
Bring three questions: Which system would you restore first to get dispatch working? How much recent information might need to be re-entered? When was that recovery last tested, and what did the test show?
A backup helps recover information. Your team also needs a practical way to work while recovery happens. Agree who contacts the field-service software vendor and who keeps your dispatcher informed, so everyone isn't waiting for someone else to make the call.
Leave with one fix and a date
Write down five answers: where the schedule is available; who handles incoming calls; how technicians receive updates; what makes a job wait; and who leads recovery. For every missing answer, add an owner and a date to check it again.
Start with the gap that would stop the next crew from working. After it's fixed, repeat the exercise with another job. You don't need to solve every possible outage in one meeting. You do need to know whether the fallback you chose actually works.
Already a STOCK TECHNOLOGIES client?
Ask us to confirm the dispatch systems covered by your support agreement, who owns the recovery process and when the agreed recovery steps were last tested. We should be able to explain the backup coverage, access arrangements and vendor responsibilities that apply to your environment, and identify any gaps that need a separate decision. This article doesn't mean every protection is already included or configured for every client.
Looking for help with your IT?
STOCK TECHNOLOGIES provides data backup and recovery and managed IT services. Start with a conversation about the systems your team needs to keep dispatch working, the responsibilities involved and what support would fit your business.
Further reading
The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends planning communications, keeping important vendor contacts and testing your continuity plan. Its guide, Seven Ways to Start Your Business Continuity Plan, provides broader context for that planning. The dispatch exercise above is our practical application for field-service businesses.