Run the day · The board and the field
Not a whiteboard photo at seven a.m. Not the group text. One timeline, one row per technician, and a now-line that moves with the shift — with the right history already attached.
What it is
A dispatch boardin Thermal is a single day-view timeline — one row per technician, jobs placed against the hours they're working, and a now-line that tracks the actual time. Every job on the board is a real work order, tied back to a customer, a service site, and usually a specific piece of equipment.
The board is the daily operating surface for the office. The field app is the same day, seen by the technician who's driving it — offline-capable, built for a rooftop in July.
Dispatch is stage five — it pulls from the customer, site and equipment records to build the day, and everything the technician does out there lands back on the same work order.
One account. Every site under it.
The address, and the branch that covers it.
The unit on the call, with its history attached.
Coverage rules that decide what this visit bills.
Scheduled here, worked in the field, one record.
You are hereBuilt from the work, closed on the spot.
A generated preventive-maintenance visit arrives on the board from the service agreement's schedule already carrying its equipment list, so it isn't re-typed on the morning of. Emergency work jumps the queue with the unit's service history already open, and coverage from the agreement decides how the invoice is built when the job closes.
| Work order | Customer & site | Tech | Window | Type | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EMG‑0312 | Northgate MedicalChiller penthouse · Ottawa | T. Bell | 08:15 | Emergency | Emergency |
| WO‑1842 | Valley FoodsPlant 2 · Winnipeg | K. Osei | 09:00 | PM visit | On route |
| WO‑1843 | Cedar Park LogisticsDC 3 · Mississauga | M. Dupont | 10:30 | Callback | Scheduled |
| WO‑1844 | Riverside FoodsDock 1 · Winnipeg | K. Osei | 11:15 | Multi-visit (2 of 3) | On site |
| WO‑1847 | Harbour Point TowerPenthouse · Halifax | J. Malo | 13:00 | T&M | SLA window open |
The day-to-day board plus the parts of the day that don't fit a calendar grid. Five of these are in the product now; two are on the roadmap and say so.
A timeline view of every technician's day — scheduled jobs, live status, and a now-line that tracks the actual time. The office sees the whole day at a glance, and nothing lives in a separate spreadsheet that has to be reconciled with the job records at night. It's the same board schedule adherence reads from.
An emergency work order surfaces above the unscheduled rail with its own marker, so it doesn't get lost between routine callbacks. The dispatcher decides who takes it and when, with the customer's history already open rather than a blank ticket — the same history that drives first-time fix rate.
A job that needs a return trip — parts on order, a second technician, a phased shutdown — stays one work order across every visit. History and billing don't fragment into separate tickets, so visit two starts where visit one ended.
The field app keeps working in a basement mechanical room or a rural call with no bars. Photos, readings, and signatures capture offline and sync the moment the truck is back in range — nothing has to be re-entered from memory at the end of the day.
Route, jobs, and schedule in one mobile view — the customer, the site, the equipment history, and the work order detail a technician needs to walk in prepared, not just an address and a time.
Placing the right technician against an open job by real-time position and drive time, rather than certification and current load alone, is on the roadmap. Today, dispatch assignment is a decision the office makes on the board using the same history.
A drafted first pass at the whole day's assignments — certification, drive time, and current load weighed together — is on the roadmap, aimed at the same dispatch efficiency number a dispatcher already watches. Every suggestion would still need a dispatcher's approval before it goes live; the board is not being handed to an unattended scheduler.
Three boundaries worth knowing before a demo, because they change how you plan the day.
No suggestion applies itself to a live board. Assigning, swapping, and overriding stay with the dispatcher. The bounded-autonomy model Thermal is building toward is written up on the automation page — and even there, Auto is a per-module dial with bounds, not a default.
Thermal tracks jobs, not telematics. Live-vehicle GPS that would power nearest-tech assignment is on the roadmap; today the board shows a technician's status from the field app, not a ping from the truck.
If a capability isn't on this page, assume it isn't built. We'd rather lose a deal on a missing feature than win one on a sentence that turns out to be aspirational.
The board is where the day gets built — these are the records it reads from and writes to in the order it touches them.
The ones that come up before a shop signs, answered at the level they're actually asked at.
Yes — dispatch scopes to the branches a user has access to, so a multi-branch operation runs one system without every dispatcher seeing every other branch's board by default.
It stays the same work order across every visit instead of splitting into separate tickets, so the technician on visit two sees exactly what happened on visit one and the customer gets one invoice, not several.
Photos, meter readings, and signatures capture and save on the device, then sync automatically once the technician is back in range — nothing has to be re-entered from memory at the end of the day.
Not yet — placing a technician by live location and drive time is on the roadmap. Today, dispatch assignment is a decision the office makes on the board, using the same customer, site, and equipment history.
For field service, yes — customer, site, and job history live on the same record the dispatch board reads from, so a technician sees who they're visiting and what's happened before without a second system.
Yes — work orders generated from a service agreement's schedule land on the dispatch board like any other call, carrying the equipment list and the coverage status for each covered unit.
Bring the day you're dreading — the emergency, the double-booked tech, the multi-visit job nobody can find the history for — and watch it hold together on one timeline.