What the dispatcher does
Audience: Operations and dispatch managers who configure, supervise, or explain automatic order assignment to their team. Purpose: Understand what the dispatcher does and why it makes a given decision.
The Dispatcher is the system that automatically decides which driver (or external carrier) delivers which order, and when. It runs on its own, on a schedule you control, and re-evaluates every store's pending orders each time it runs.
These pages explain the logic behind those decisions in business terms: what the algorithm optimises for, what determines priority, which settings are available to you, and what to expect — or not expect — from it.
How to read this chapter
You don't need to read it front to back. Most questions land on one page:
| If you want to know… | Go to |
|---|---|
| What a term means | Dispatcher glossary |
| What happens on each run | The assignment cycle, step by step |
| Why an order stayed with an external carrier | Re-checking orders already with a carrier |
| Why one driver was chosen over another | Driver classification and priority |
| Why an order changed driver | When an order changes driver |
| Why an order was left unassigned | Last-Option: the final safety net and the Dispatcher FAQ |
| How often it runs, and how to start or stop it | Scheduling plans: how the automatic cycle works |
| Where to change a particular setting | Where each setting lives |
| The whole flow on one page | End-to-end overview |
| A rule, without the explanation | Quick reference rules |
| How to report something that looks wrong | Reporting a dispatcher issue |
Once the dispatcher has made its decisions, the live board where a person can intervene is the Hub — see The Hub: what it is and who can do what.
What it does not do
The dispatcher is deliberately bounded. It does not try to find a mathematically perfect plan across every driver and every order at once, it never touches an order that has already left the store, and it does not reorder work just because one order is more urgent than another. Those limits are listed in full under Known system boundaries — they are design decisions, not faults, and knowing them saves a lot of guesswork.