Visualize On-Ground Scheduling with the Map
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how to map permissions to your dispatchers.
- Review geographic data such as traffic and technician routes.
- Modify appointments geographically with polygons and bulk actions.
Your Operation on the Map
By now, your dispatcher has the Gantt and the appointment list down to a science–tracking jobs, spotting rule violations, and rescheduling work without missing a beat. Between the two, they know exactly what's supposed to happen throughout the day. But knowing the plan and watching it actually play out are two very different things.
Go back to that control center analogy. The Gantt and the appointment list work a bit like a daily itinerary and a roster, telling your dispatcher who's working, when they started, and what tasks are lined up. The map, on the other hand, is like observing that entire operation from a distance. It shows exactly where every technician is located right now, not just where they're supposed to be.
That difference matters more than it might seem. A technician might get stuck in traffic on the highway, running twenty minutes behind. From a Gantt alone, your dispatcher might think the technician’s day is still perfectly on track, since nothing about the schedule itself has changed. The map tells the real story. With that visibility, your dispatcher catches the delay early and reroutes a nearby technician to cover the next job, instead of finding out only after an unhappy customer calls in.
The map gives your dispatcher a real-time, geographical view of exactly where every resource and appointment stands at any given moment. And it doesn't work in isolation either. Whatever changes on the Gantt or the appointment list shows up on the map too, keeping all three views in sync at all times.
Assign Map Permissions to Dispatchers
Unlike the Gantt and the appointment list, the map isn't something your dispatchers view the moment they log in. As the admin, you need to grant access to it first, the same way you handled permissions for the console itself earlier in this badge. It only takes a couple of steps, and once it's done, your dispatchers get access to schedules, lists, and locations, all in one place.
Here's how to set it up.
- Go to Setup
.
- In the Setup Quick Find box, search for and select Permission Sets.
- Select Field Service Dispatcher Permissions.
- Select App Permissions | Edit.
- Under Scheduling Console, enable all the checkboxes.
- Save your changes.
Salesforce admins can also enable map polygons from setup, which lets dispatchers create polygons on the map to perform bulk actions or set up geographic boundaries for their territories.
Here’s how admins do that.
- While still in Field Service Dispatcher Permissions, search for and select Custom Permissions.
- Select Edit.
- Select the FSL.Polygons - create\update permission. Use the arrow to add it to the list of enabled permissions.
- Select Save.
Map Out the Details
With access turned on, it's time to actually open up the map and explore what's waiting inside. It might seem like a simple view of pins scattered across a city, but there's more going on under the surface. Every element on screen is designed to give your dispatcher a clearer read on their team and what's happening in real time. To open the Map on your Scheduling Console, simply navigate to the console and select the Maps
button on the top right.
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Map Layers: This menu controls what shows up on the map. Use it to include or hide things such as service appointment locations, homebases, and territory polygons. Your dispatcher also uses the map to check real-time traffic conditions and plan technician routes around them.
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Polygons: Draw shapes directly on the map to mark out service territory boundaries. Once drawn, your dispatcher can select every appointment within that area and run bulk actions on all of them at once.
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Show Routes Menu: Review the planned travel route for one or more technicians. Paired with the traffic layer, this gives your dispatcher a realistic sense of travel time between appointments, not just a straight line on a map.
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New Tab button: Pop the map out into a new tab for a bigger, more detailed view.
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Service Appointment Pins: Every appointment on the Gantt or the appointment list also shows up on the map as a color-coded pin, so your dispatcher can identify exactly where things are on the ground. Here's what each color means.
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White: Unscheduled, drag these pins onto the Gantt to schedule the appointment into an open slot
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Yellow: Scheduled
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Blue: Dispatched
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Purple: In progress
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Green: Completed
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Red: Cancelled
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White: Unscheduled, drag these pins onto the Gantt to schedule the appointment into an open slot
That covers the map at an overview. Every appointment shows up as a pin. Every color tells you something about its status. Your dispatcher can review the whole day laid out across the map, all in real time.
But some days call for more than just a look. Imagine a storm rolling through part of your service territory. A dozen appointments in that same area suddenly need to be pushed to another day, all at once. Going through each one individually would eat up half the morning. This is exactly the kind of moment those polygons were built for.
Act on a Whole Area at Once
A polygon is simply a shape your dispatcher draws right on the map. It can trace out a single street, a whole neighborhood, or an entire service territory, whatever the moment calls for. Once the shape is drawn, every appointment sitting inside it gets selected together as a group.
From there, your dispatcher can act on all of them at once instead of working through them one by one. They could reschedule or unschedule the whole batch in a single move, or even change their status at the same time. A task that would normally take a dozen separate steps turns into just one.
Here's how you do this.
- Select the Polygon
.
- Plot the first point of your polygon on the map.
- Continue plotting points to create the polygon boundaries, and press Enter to finish plotting.
- Select Save Polygon, and enter an appropriate name and color.
- Select the service territory your polygon represents wholly or partially.
- Select Save.
Once you’ve created your polygon, you can select it to pop open the details window. From there, your dispatcher can run bulk actions on all of them together, turning what used to be a dozen separate steps into just a handful.
Wrap Up
Think back to that morning you started with. A packed schedule, a technician calling in sick, appointments quietly slipping out of sync, and a dispatcher trying to keep the whole day from unraveling. That's the reality of field service, day in and day out. Plans change fast, and someone has to be ready to change with them.
The Scheduling Console was built for exactly that kind of morning. Instead of chasing information across a dozen different screens, your dispatcher now works from one place, with three views working together instead of against each other. The Gantt lays out the shape of the day. The appointment list monitors every unscheduled job instead of letting them slip through the cracks. And the map fills in the one piece neither of the others could offer alone—where everyone is actually located, right now, in the field.
Behind all of it sits a quieter kind of support. A yellow triangle here, a suggested candidate there, a quick explanation of why one technician makes more sense than another. None of it replaces your dispatcher's judgment. It just clears away the noise, so the decisions that matter get made faster, and nothing important gets buried under everything else.
That's really what the new Scheduling Console is all about. More than a single feature or a single screen. A dispatcher's entire day, handled a little better, task by task.