6 Best Practices for Improving Ticket Assignment and Routing Efficiency in Utility Locating

In utility locating, efficiency isn’t just about how quickly technicians complete tickets in the field. The processes behind assigning work, planning daily routes, and managing field resources can have just as much impact on productivity and operating costs.

As ticket volumes increase and service territories expand, even small inefficiencies can add up to significant amounts of lost time and unnecessary administrative work. Improving efficiency starts with taking a closer look at how work is organized and managed each day.

Better Planning Starts Before Locators Enter the Field
Utility locating teams must balance ticket volumes, deadlines, geographic coverage, and available personnel. When ticket assignments and route planning are handled independently—or require extensive manual coordination—opportunities to improve efficiency can easily be missed.

A more coordinated approach can help reduce unnecessary administrative work, minimize travel time, and maximize field productivity.

Here are six best practices utility locating companies can adopt to improve ticket assignment and routing efficiency:

1. Establish Consistent Ticket Assignment Criteria
Establish clear criteria for distributing tickets based on geography, technician availability, workload, ticket type, priority, and deadlines to ensure work is assigned appropriately and consistently across the team.

2. Simplify Repetitive Assignment Tasks
Group tickets by common characteristics and look for opportunities to reduce manual sorting, individual assignments, and administrative updates. Streamlining these repetitive tasks can be particularly valuable when managing large ticket volumes.

3. Plan Routes to Minimize Unnecessary Travel
Organize daily work geographically to reduce backtracking, excess mileage, and time spent moving between job sites. Effective route planning should balance travel efficiency with ticket deadlines and priorities to maximize productive field time.

4. Build Flexibility Into Daily Schedules
Emergencies, changing workloads, and unexpected field conditions can disrupt even the most carefully planned day. Establish processes that allow tickets to be reassigned and routes adjusted quickly without creating unnecessary administrative delays.

5. Evaluate Routing Practices Across the Team
Regularly review how routes are created and distributed across technicians to identify inefficient travel patterns, inconsistent planning practices, and opportunities to better balance workloads.

6. Use Operational Data to Guide Improvements
Track relevant measures such as travel time, tickets completed, and workload distribution to identify trends and make more informed decisions about future assignments and routing.

Small Improvements Can Deliver Meaningful Results
Improving utility locating efficiency doesn’t necessarily mean asking technicians to work faster or adding more resources. By eliminating unnecessary administrative steps, reducing travel time, and making better use of field resources, utility locating companies can improve productivity, control operating costs, and manage increasing ticket volumes more effectively.

SmartTIX Helps Put These Practices Into Action
Purpose-built for utility locators, SmartTIX brings ticket assignment, route optimization, and operational visibility together in one easy-to-use, field-ready ticket management platform.

With SmartTIX, utility locating teams can:

Assign tickets faster. Use keywords to automatically assign tickets to users for bulk updates, reducing repetitive administrative work.
Optimize daily routes in seconds. Use SmartRoute to generate optimized routes for up to 100 tickets in seconds, helping reduce unnecessary travel and maximize productive field time.
Improve routing efficiency across the team. View routes created by all users to identify opportunities for more efficient planning and better resource utilization.

Ready to make every ticket assignment and route more efficient? Schedule a demo today to see these SmartTIX capabilities in action.