About Daily Dispatching

On service days, dispatchers are the point of contact between agencies and their employees. They check that operators are able to work and manage scheduled transit services.

Trapeze OPS assists dispatchers with completing their daily activities:

Signing operators on to and off from work.
Communicating with employees.
Dispatchers need to give information to employees. For example, their assigned vehicles or if absence requests were granted. Automated messages can be sent using the Sign-In Terminal add-on module.
Recording sick or late operators to open work, monitoring work that was opened, and assigning work to standby operators or volunteers.
Recording changes to the operational schedule, recording events such as accidents and incidents, and updating work.

If your agency has integratedOPS with in-vehicle systems, dispatchers can receive work and vehicle information directly from vehicles and give information to operators in real time.

OPS and its add-on products offer several ways to sign employees on to and off from work:

Manually, using the Daily Activity screen.
Employees can sign themselves into work using Sign-In Terminal.
Operators can sign themselves into work and off of work using on-board computers using OPS–Trapeze Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) integration.

Daily dispatching involves managing events that occur on an operational day. Some actions occur before the vehicles leave the garage (pre-pullout) while other actions can occur at any time during the operational day (ad hoc).

Table 1. Pre-Pullout Daily Dispatching Actions
Action	Screen(s)/Tool(s)	Description
Activate Day	Activate Day	Start daily dispatching by activating the day. Activating the day does the following: Prepares work schedules, while taking into account absences, hold downs, and extra work. Prepares extraboard lists. Prepares daily block information. If employees don't have assigned bid units for the day, assigns default bid units according to employee type. If no days off are found for active operators during the week, days off are assigned to those operators. Gives warnings about expired employee skills.
Viewing Information	Daily Employee List Daily List Hours Inquiry	Lists give more information to employees and can be helpful to agencies when they make decisions.
Assign Extraboard	Work Assignment Assistant Profile Work Assignment Assistant Publish Assignments	Extraboard assignments typically fill open work created during Daily Dispatching Preparation. Depending on your agency, you may use tools to help make assignment decisions. Work Assignment Assistant automatically assigns employees based on rules. Suggest Employee suggests an employee to be assigned the work.

Ad hoc actions include the following:

Creating absences
Creating open work
Splitting and undoing work
Assigning work
Signing operators on and off from work
Assigning extra work
Adding extra work time
Reporting incidents
Viewing employee messages
Editing work times