Run it with less chaos · Every business
Same-Day and Emergency Jobs: Fitting Them In Without Wrecking the Schedule
Burst pipes and backed-up drains arrive at random, but the number that arrive in a typical day is steady enough to plan around, so a plumbing company can hold a few slots for them and release the rest on a clock.
At a glance
- An emergency reserve is a small number of technician slots held open each day for same-day and urgent jobs, released at a set time to planned work if no emergency claims them.
- Emergencies are common across the housing stock: in the 2019 American Housing Survey, 9.4 million of 124 million occupied homes, about 7.6%, reported water coming in from inside the home in the previous 12 months, and 2.1 million had no working toilet at some point in the previous three months.
- For an illustrative company that averages three emergency jobs a day, holding four slots covers every emergency on about 82% of days, and releasing unused slots at 11 a.m. returns about 330 slots a year to planned work.
- Count same-day requests for eight weeks, set the reserve from that count, and give the dispatcher a script that tells planned customers and emergency callers the same honest thing.
Part 1 | Emergencies are random one by one and steady in total
A plumbing company cannot know which house will flood tomorrow, but it can know how many floods, clogs, failed water heaters and no-heat calls it handles in a typical day. We can't plan for emergencies; that's what makes them emergencies. The instinct is right about any single job and wrong about the total, and most shops that track same-day requests for a couple of months find the daily count settles into a range they could have predicted, higher on Mondays and after a cold snap and lower midweek.
The demand behind those counts is large. The Census Bureau's 2019 American Housing Survey found that 9.4 million occupied homes had water coming in from inside the home during the previous year and 11.7 million had water coming in from outside, out of 124 million, and 2.1 million households had gone without a working toilet at some point in the previous three months, so a company serving a few thousand homes will see a steady flow of urgent work whether it plans for it or not.
When nothing is held back, each emergency is forced into a booked day. The technician on a planned water heater install leaves for a burst line, the 1 p.m. customer gets a call at 12:40 saying the visit is now tomorrow, and the company has traded one customer's trust for another's, which is the scheduling version of a hospital running too full: a simulation study in the BMJ found that hospitals averaging 85% bed occupancy began to run short on some days and concluded that some empty, staffed capacity is a necessary cost of reliable emergency service.
Part 2 | Hold a reserve and release it on a clock
Daily counts of random events like emergency calls tend to follow a pattern statisticians call a Poisson distribution, which makes it possible to work out how often a given reserve will cover the day. With an average of three emergencies a day, a reserve of three slots covers every emergency on about 65% of days, four slots on about 82% and five slots on about 92%.
The release rule keeps the reserve from becoming idle time. Unclaimed reserve slots go back to planned work at a fixed hour, such as 11 a.m., and are offered to a short list of customers who said they could take a same-day visit for non-urgent work: drain maintenance, a fixture install, a water heater flush or a second-opinion estimate.
Primary care medicine has tested the same idea under the name advanced access, which holds much of each day open for patients who call that day. A systematic review in Archives of Internal Medicine covering 24 studies found that all eight studies measuring the wait for the third-next-available appointment reported shorter waits, by 1.1 to 32 days, and that no-show rates improved in practices that started with rates above 15%.
Part 3 | The dispatcher's words
The reserve only works if the office explains it the same way every time. These lines, written for a plumbing company, can be copied onto a card by the scheduling screen.
To an emergency caller:
We hold time every day for jobs like this. Is water still running, and do you know where the main shut-off is? I can have a technician there between [time] and [time], and if you can close the main shut-off before then, the damage stops spreading while you wait.
To a customer booking planned work:
Our earliest planned slot is [day]. If you're flexible, we can put you on our same-day list; if a reserved slot opens by 11 a.m. on a day that works, we'll text you and you can say yes or no.
To a planned customer when an emergency does move a job (the rare case):
I'm sorry; an emergency on your technician's route has run long. I can offer [new time] today or the first slot tomorrow at [time], and we'll waive the [service fee] for the change.
| Same-day emergencies per day (eight-week average) (Assumption) | 3 |
|---|---|
| Slots held each morning (Assumption) | 4 |
| Days every emergency fits in the reserve (Calculated (Poisson)) | 81.5% |
| Days with more emergencies than slots (Calculated (18.5% × 250 days)) | about 46 a year |
| Unclaimed reserve slots per day, on average (Calculated (Poisson)) | 1.32 |
| Slots released to planned work per year (Calculated (1.32 × 250)) | about 330 |
| Share of released slots filled from the same-day list (Assumption) | 50% |
| Average planned job (Assumption) | $350 |
| Planned revenue from released slots per year (Calculated (329.8 × 50% × $350)) | about $57,700 |
Illustrative example; replace every assumption with your own numbers. On days when emergencies exceed the reserve, the overflow goes to an on-call technician or the first slot the next morning, decided in advance.
How you compare
- Coverage: a reserve that covers every emergency on four days out of five, with a planned overflow rule for the fifth, is a reasonable starting target for a small shop.
- Bumped jobs: count how many planned customers were moved for an emergency last month; the goal is close to zero.
- Your own baseline: eight weeks of same-day requests by day of the week, with the average and the highest day, is enough to set the first reserve.
Questions to ask this week
How many same-day requests did we get each day for the last eight weeks? The average sets the reserve and the busiest days set the overflow rule.
How many planned jobs were moved for an emergency? Each one is a customer who may not book again.
What time do unclaimed slots go back? Pick one hour and write it on the dispatch board.
Who is on the same-day list? Ask every planned customer whether they could take an earlier visit on short notice.
The next step is to pull eight weeks of job records, mark which ones were booked the same day, and set tomorrow's reserve from the daily average.
About this research: This article draws on the Census Bureau's 2019 American Housing Survey, a BMJ simulation of hospital capacity, and a systematic review of advanced access scheduling in Archives of Internal Medicine. Exhibits 1 and 2 are calculated for an illustrative plumbing company.
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau. American Housing Survey 2019: Housing Quality. 2021. Base of 124 million occupied homes.
- Bagust, A., Place, M. and Posnett, J. W. Dynamics of bed use in accommodating emergency admissions: stochastic simulation model. BMJ 319:155–158, 1999.
- Rose, K. D., Ross, J. S. and Horwitz, L. I. Advanced Access Scheduling Outcomes: A Systematic Review. Archives of Internal Medicine 171(13):1150–1159, 2011. 24 studies.
Related reading: Arrival Windows Homeowners Trust: Scheduling for Home Service Pros · The Leave-Behind Folder for Plumbers and Electricians · Seasonal Reminder Calendars for HVAC, Landscaping and Pest Control · Capacity Planning for Service Businesses: How Full Is Full? · Utilization Rate: The Number Behind a Busy Week That Still Loses Money
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