Every operator has a version of this story. A stop got skipped on a Thursday. The driver meant to mention it. Dispatch assumed it was done. The customer noticed the following Wednesday, when the unit had gone two weeks, and the call that came in was not a nice one. The problem was never the skipped stop. It was the six days nobody knew.
Define "missed" before you measure it
A missed stop is an open job whose day has passed. That sounds obvious until you try to write it down. Is today's 4 pm stop missed at 4:01? At the end of the shift? Does a stop the driver flagged as "gate locked" count, or is that a different list? Pick a definition and keep it: open jobs with a past date, plus today's jobs once a daily cutoff arrives, plus today's jobs the driver has reported a problem on. Cancelled and skipped jobs are not misses, because somebody decided them.
The report, at a time
The fix for the six days is one message, every day, at a time you choose, listing every missed stop grouped by driver with the reason where the driver gave one. Email is the floor; a push notification and, for the dispatcher who is already in the truck heading home, a text. Nothing missed means nothing sent, and the report should still note it ran.
The time matters. Six o'clock catches the day. Noon catches nothing because the day is not over. Eight the next morning is a day late. And the report should be off by default for a brand-new account: a company mid-import with seventy open past-date jobs from the old system does not want "70 stops missed" the first night.
Reschedule from the report, not from the calendar
The report is only useful if the next click fixes the stop. Open it, pick the stops, pick a day and a driver, done. A good reschedule records where the stop came from and why it moved, resolves the driver's reported problem, slots the stop into tomorrow's published route if there is one, and tells the driver. The reschedule should suggest the obvious options first: tomorrow with the same driver, the next day that driver is already in the area, or whoever has a route within ten miles that day.
What the reschedule should never do is edit the date silently. A stop that moves three times with no record looks like a stop that was done three times late.
When to let it move itself
Some operators want silent misses to move to the next weekday on their own. That is safe under one rule: a stop with an open driver-reported problem never moves automatically. The driver told you the gate was locked, or the customer said come back Monday. A person has to decide those. A stop nobody touched, with no reason, can move to the next weekday with the same driver, and the report can say "Moved to Wed" beside it. Keep that rule and automatic rescheduling is a time saver; drop it and it is a way to send a driver to a locked gate twice.
Dismissing a stop is a decision
Sometimes the right answer is that the stop is not going to happen: the customer cancelled by phone, the unit was already picked up. Dismissing it should close the job as skipped with a reason, so it stops showing as overdue on every screen. A dismiss that leaves the job open on a past date just hides it from one report while every other report still calls it late. And a delivery or pickup should refuse to be dismissed, because skipping it releases no equipment; reschedule or cancel those.
What this changes
The call still comes in sometimes. But it comes in on the same day, from your dispatcher to the customer, before the customer has noticed. Our post on why stops get missed in the first place covers the causes; this one is about the six days. And once the stop is done, proof that it was done closes the loop on the customer's side.
