Auto-dispatch

Auto-dispatch finds a driver for a delivery order without anyone deciding. It is the difference between a dispatcher watching a screen and a system that only needs attention when something is wrong.

When it fires

You choose the trigger status: when the order reaches Processing (order confirmed), or when it reaches Ready (ready for pickup).

Trigger at Processing and the driver arrives as the food does — better for the customer, and the usual choice where prep times are honest. Trigger at Ready and you never have a driver waiting, at the cost of a gap after the food is packed. Prep time is what makes the first option work.

The three methods

Method	How it offers the order
One-by-one (sequential nearest)	Offers to the best-scoring driver, waits, then moves to the next
Send to all (broadcast)	Offers to several drivers at once; the first to accept takes it
Nearest available (forceful)	Assigns to the best driver outright, with no acceptance step

One-by-one is fairest to drivers and slowest at peak. Broadcast is fastest and can leave drivers feeling they are racing. Forceful assignment is for employed fleets where accepting is not optional.

Each carries its own tuning: a rejection cooldown for one-by-one, so a driver who declines is not immediately re-offered; a cap on how many drivers a broadcast reaches.

How drivers are scored

Four weights decide who is offered an order first: distance, current load, a driver-type bonus, and past acceptance behaviour. Raise distance to keep deliveries tight; raise load to spread work evenly; raise acceptance to favour drivers who actually take offers.

Change one weight at a time and watch the analytics. Several at once and you will not know which did what.

Who is offered work

Your own drivers and aggregator drivers are configured separately — each with its own enable switch, priority, dispatch radius and concurrent-order cap. You choose which pool is tried first, and what happens when the first pool is exhausted: try the next in sequence, run both in parallel, or weight between them.

Aggregator drivers can additionally be restricted by zone and by driver group, which is how you keep a specialist fleet on the work it is for.

Cost comparison

With cost comparison on, auto-dispatch weighs the cost of your own driver against a Delivery networks quote before deciding — using a per-kilometre rate and base fee you set, plus a bonus that biases toward in-house when the two are close. Turn it on once your own delivery costs are actually known; before that the comparison is against a guess.

Retries, fallbacks and stepping in

Acceptance timeout — how long a driver has before the offer moves on.
Retry attempts and delay — how many times the whole search repeats.
Driver-offline handling — grace periods for a driver who drops off the network, and a timeout for one who accepted and then went offline, so an order is not stranded with someone who has gone home.
Notify on no driver — tell the outlet when the search fails, which is the moment a human needs to know.

Staff can always cancel the search from the order and assign manually. Never remove that: automation should be the default, not the only path.

Rolling it out

Start with one outlet. Per-outlet override lets you force it on or off regardless of the global setting.
Start with one-by-one, a generous acceptance timeout and default weights. It is the least surprising to drivers.
Use the simulation before going live — it shows who would be offered an order without offering it.
Watch the analytics for a week, then tune one thing.
Widen to more outlets once assignment rate and time-to-assign look right.

Watching it

Auto-Dispatch Analytics (/reports/driver-auto-dispatch) covers assignment rate, time to assign, per-method performance, per-driver and per-outlet performance, and the hourly distribution.

The numbers to watch are time to assign and failed searches. A rising time-to-assign at peak usually means too few drivers online rather than a configuration problem — and no amount of tuning fixes that.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Try this
Orders are not being dispatched	Check auto-dispatch is on for that outlet and that the trigger status has been reached
Searches fail at peak	Usually driver supply, not settings — check how many were online
Drivers say they never get offers	Check the radius, their concurrent-order cap, and the pool priority
A driver accepted and vanished	The accepted-driver offline timeout returns the order to the pool
Deliveries are going to a network when you have drivers	Check the pool priority and cost comparison
Drivers complain about racing	Switch from broadcast to one-by-one

Related: Drivers · Delivery networks · Live orders · Reports

Was this page helpful?