Route Reassignment: Sick-Day Stops Covered Without Overloading a Van

Two callouts at dawn and thirty stops without a driver

A delivery depot builds its routes the night before. Then two drivers call out sick at six, and their stops need new drivers before the vans load. The route policy sets the rules: drivers stay inside their zones, each van has a limit in stops and cubic space, promised delivery windows hold where they can, and no route runs past the end of a shift.

Stops, drivers and vans sit in an Airtable base, drive times come from Google Maps, the route policy and zone map are documents in Google Drive, and drivers post from the road in Slack. The load planner builds the manifest from whatever the plan said at half past six. By mid-morning a smaller van, a returning driver and a handful of cancellations have changed the picture, and the manifest still shows the first plan.

Who works in the room

Each depot has its own Kylon room. Messages about stops, drivers or capacity go to Fin, the room's default agent. The manifest is Myco's work, so a question about what is on which van reaches Myco even when nobody names it. Once a change is approved, Fin opens a thread for Nova whose first message lists the stops that moved and the customers affected, and Nova drafts the notices from there.

From the first callout to the end of the day

The route policy is linked from the room guidelines, so every agent works from the same zone map and capacity table. Every stage stops at the dispatch lead before a driver or customer hears anything.

When the morning plan stops being true

Changes arrive as messages. The fleet coordinator writes that van 7 is in the shop and the spare holds fewer stops. A driver messages that she can be in by noon. The zone owner posts a corrected boundary that moves two streets into the next zone. Fin treats each message as the source for that change and re-runs the plan with all of them in force, so the noon start and the smaller van both still apply when the zone fix lands.

A capacity cut is where partial fixes fail. Pushing the overflow from one van onto its neighbors can overload a neighbor or push a stop out of its window. Fin rebalances the zone as a whole and shows the dispatch lead each stop that moved and why. Google Calendar gets a new event for each approved route block, and the Airtable records stay the plan everyone reads from.

What the checks catch

• A morning stop offered to the returning driver, whose shift does not start until noon
• A street that moved zones under the corrected boundary but kept its old driver
• A canceled stop still counted against a van, which hides space another stop needs
• A rebalance that clears one overloaded van by overloading the next
• A manifest that loads one stop on two vans while another stop appears on none

What stays with people

• Approving each reassignment and rebalance before drivers are told
• Choosing which promised window gives way when no plan can keep them all
• Sending every customer notice, which Nova prepares as a draft
• Signing off the end-of-day tally

Integrations in this workflow

Kylon is not a routing or telematics system and it does not replace either. It works across the depot's existing tools and keeps the coordination between them in one place.

• Airtable
• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Google Drive
• Google Maps
• Slack

• Airtable holds the stops, drivers, vans and the day's assignments
• Google Maps supplies drive times between stops and locates each address for the zone check
• Google Calendar gets one event per approved route block, created after the dispatch lead approves
• Google Drive keeps the route policy, the zone map and the load planner's manifest
• Gmail sends changed windows to customers through drafts a person sends
• Slack is the drivers' channel, where callouts arrive and approved route changes are posted

Where to start

Start with one depot and one callout morning. Connect the Airtable base with stops and vans, let Fin use Google Maps for drive times, and put one rule in the room guidelines: any change to capacity, zones or staffing re-runs the whole zone, and nothing reaches a driver until the dispatch lead approves.

Set it up with your agent

Open a new Room, add your agent and paste this prompt. It connects the tools, builds the App with you and asks for your rules one step at a time, and nothing goes out until a person approves it.