Visual dispatch board + live GPS driver tracking on a map

Scheduling waste pickups from multiple clients, with multiple drivers, in a single day, is hard to do efficiently from a plain list. Who's going where, in what order, and who still has free time today — that information used to live only in the dispatcher's head or in a WhatsApp group with the drivers.

We added a visual dispatch board, with drag-and-drop, plus each driver's live position on a map — but we handled the GPS tracking part separately and carefully, because that's where consent comes into play.

The dispatch board

The new pickup scheduling page shows one column per driver, plus a column for unassigned orders. You drag an order from the unassigned column straight onto the right driver, or move it between drivers if the day's plan changes. Each order can get an estimated time window, editable directly on its card.

Reordering a driver's orders is validated on the server — you can't accidentally mix orders from different drivers or different days into a single reorder, the app explicitly rejects that case. On the same page, the map shows the current position of every active driver, so you can see at a glance who's close to the next stop.

One initial limitation: the board only showed a column for drivers who already had at least one order assigned that day — a free driver with no orders yet had nowhere to drag a new one. We fixed that: now every active driver in the fleet gets a column, regardless of how many orders they currently have.

GPS tracking — active only with explicit consent

A driver's position on the map isn't permanent tracking. Coordinates are only sent while the app is open and active on the driver's phone, during an active route — if the phone goes to the background or the driver has no orders that day, sending stops automatically.

The legal basis used is legitimate interest, strictly limited to the dispatching purpose, not general employee monitoring. In practice, the app checks three conditions every time before accepting a position: the client has explicitly enabled tracking, the mobile account is linked to a driver in the fleet, and the driver has an active route for the current day. Without all three, the position is rejected.

The most important detail for any operator considering this feature: enabling GPS tracking in Settings requires explicit confirmation — a separate checkbox where the operator declares they've informed drivers in writing about the tracking, as required by GDPR transparency rules. Without this confirmation, the activation toggle doesn't work. Position data is kept for 30 days and then permanently deleted — it's treated as operational telemetry strictly for routing, not as a permanent record of employee movement.

A detail that mattered for drivers, not just the dispatcher

During live testing, we also found a problem in the opposite direction: the "my schedule" mobile app was showing each driver every order for that day across the entire client account, not just the ones assigned to them. A driver could accidentally see their colleagues' orders. We fixed the filtering — a driver now sees only their own assigned orders plus the still-unassigned ones (which anyone can pick up), never orders already assigned to someone else.

Why it matters for an operator

Visual dispatching cuts the time spent planning the day from minutes spent rereading a table down to a glance at a map. But the GPS component is the one that deserves an operator's real attention before turning it on: it's operationally useful, but it's still a form of employee tracking, and the app was deliberately built so it can't be turned on "by accident" or without drivers knowing. If you enable tracking, the conversation with the field team needs to happen beforehand, in writing — it's not optional, it's a technical prerequisite for the feature to turn on at all.