These phrases get used interchangeably and they name two different activities that happen to share a screen. Scheduling is planning: what goes on tomorrow and who takes it. Dispatching is choosing under pressure: the first call has run long, one technician is free early, and somebody has to be told something. Software that is good at the first and bad at the second is the commonest disappointment in this category.
Scheduling is arithmetic done in advance
It starts with a ceiling. On the worked example this site publishes, 6 technicians at 5.2 completed jobs a day is 31.2, and 655 a month. Everything above that number is not extra work, it is a queue that will be rescheduled at somebody expense. Good scheduling is mostly the discipline of not booking past a number you have actually measured.
Dispatching is judgement made in seconds
It needs where everybody is, what each customer was promised, and which customers have already been moved once. Moving the same person twice is what turns an inconvenience into a complaint, and no calendar remembers it. This is the half that a spreadsheet cannot do at all, however carefully the spreadsheet is maintained.
The two fail differently
Bad scheduling shows up as a day that was never possible. Bad dispatching shows up as a day that was possible and went wrong anyway. If your problem is the first, measure completions and stop overbooking. If it is the second, you need a shared board that can be redealt, and no amount of planning discipline substitutes.
One board, because they touch constantly
Every dispatch decision changes the schedule and every scheduling decision constrains the dispatcher. Keeping them in separate tools means somebody reconciles, and reconciliation is a job that is never finished and never noticed until it has been skipped. This is the argument for one screen rather than two good ones.
Questions people ask about scheduling and dispatching software
Which do we need first?
Almost always the dispatching half, because that is where the day is actually lost. Scheduling discipline can be practised on a whiteboard; redealing cannot.
Can the software dispatch automatically?
It can suggest. The real decision is usually which customer to disappoint, and that is not an algorithm decision.
Is this different from route planning?
Yes. Route planning orders a fixed set of stops. Dispatching decides which stops exist and who takes them.