'Lights Out Dispatch' or 'Automatic Dispatch' is the ability to automatically assign new jobs to workers without any manual intervention by a dispatcher.

This is done in vWork by pre-assigning a worker (or multiple workers) to a template. This saves time and money by removing the need for manual dispatching.

Enable 'Lights Out Dispatch'

There are three steps to enabling Lights Out Dispatch.

1. Set up the Customer Portal

Begin by giving your customers the permission to create new jobs in your account through a Customer Portal. You can find out all about the Customer Portal here.

2. Enable 'Multi-Assign' (Optional)

The second step is to enable vWork to assign more than one worker to a job. We call this 'Multi-Assign' and it works with the 'Accept and Decline Jobs' option. You can enable these options in the General Settings.

'Multi-Assign' allows you to broadcast publish any job to a set of workers. The worker who accepts the job first gets the job. The job is then automatically removed from the other workers' schedules. The article, Set up and broadcast a job to multiple workers (Multi-Assign), explains how to set up 'Multi-Assign'.

🔔 Note: This is an optional step. You can simply assign templates to different individual workers if you don't want to enable workers to accept and decline jobs in thevWork mobile app.

3. Pre-assign Workers to a job template

The final step, is to pre-assign workers to your job templates. You can do this in the Template Settings.

When you save an asigned worker (or all workers) in the a job template, all jobs created from that template have that worker autmatically assigned to the job.

To pre-assign a worker to a job template:

1. Go to Settings > Templates
2. Select the template you want pre-assign workers to, or create a new job template.
3. In the 'Job Information' tab, scroll to the section 'Assign the Job to a Worker' then select the workers you want to add to the template.
   💡 Tip: If you have enabled 'Multi-Assign' you can select 'Assign to all workers' to broadcast publish new jobs based on this template to all workers on their mobile app.

From now on, when a new job is created from this template (either by a customer or a dispatcher) it is automatically assigned to the worker or workers you selected.

Or just use the API...

The other option for automatically creating new jobs and assigning them to workers is to use the vWork API. You can find all of the API details here.