Sending crews out
Send a boat at a shoreline. There’s no calendar in this.
LakeOps has no calendar scheduling. A crew goes out with a boat, a set of gear, a lake and the bays they’re working, and they take whatever’s still waiting there. You already run it this way — the weather doesn’t leave you a choice — so the software runs it that way too.
You can’t schedule wind
Ice-out moves three weeks year to year. A north wind closes the exposed side by ten and opens the protected side. Half your customers call the week they arrive. A route built in March is wrong by the second week of May, and rebuilding it every morning is a job nobody in your shop has time for. So there’s nothing to rebuild. Everything still waiting sits on one list, sorted by which bay it’s in, and a crew takes whatever’s waiting where they are.
- Barge 1, two hands, the north arm, installs. That’s the setup, and it takes a minute.
- The crew gets handed everything still open on that water
- Move them to the calm side and the work follows — nothing has to be unassigned, because nothing was assigned
- Add a stop by hand and it stays on their list even when you move them
The gear decides what a crew can take
Some shorelines you can’t reach without the crane barge. Some lifts need it. Some runs need four hands on deck. That belongs on the piece of equipment, not in somebody’s head at the landing — so a crew going out with a given boat sees plainly what they can and can’t do today.
- Fork barge, crane barge, small barge, truck and trailer — name them whatever you call them
- Take the crane along and the work that needs it opens up on their list
- Each boat carries a color, and that color is the ring on the map pin
- “Needs the crane barge” sits on the lift, so nobody finds out at the shoreline
Two boats, one property, no argument
It happens constantly. The fork barge sets the dock in the morning and the crane barge sets the lift on Thursday, or both are on that shore at once. Each crew marks what it set. Neither one wipes out the other’s work, and neither one has to wait for the other to finish first.
- Each crew marks its own pieces; the property doesn’t get locked by whoever got there first
- The clock says who was on the property and when
- Closing out the day closes a stop somebody forgot to leave
- One boat can’t be out with two crews, and one hand can’t be aboard two boats
Questions about this
- How do you assign jobs to crews?
- You don’t. A crew is sent to a lake and a set of bays and takes whatever is still pending there. On a lake, the weather reassigns your crews for you, so any property-by-property plan is wrong inside a day.
- What happens when the wind comes up?
- You move the boat to different bays, and the open work on that water is immediately what the crew sees. Nothing has to be released or unassigned, because nothing was assigned in the first place.
- Can I still send a crew to one specific place?
- Yes. Add a stop to their list by hand — “look at that lift while you’re out there” — and it stays on their list even if you send them somewhere else.
See it with your own shoreline on the screen
Half an hour. A few of your properties loaded, the pins dropped, a season run through it. If it’s not obviously better than what you’re doing now, that’s the answer you’ll get.