Tour Optimisation

Here you can do a variety of things. On this pager you are able to do your planning.

Let me give you a short introduction about all the functions you can find here.

Starting on the left side you can find your tour list with all your tours. Here you will edit you tour parameters and numbers. You can add new tours and delete old tours. You are also able to use historical data to create new tours or to tune existing tours to the maximum. In this part of the tool you can create different tour plans and activate them when needed. Here you have also the option to edit your tours on the map. Draw them, edit them, cut them or delete them to create new areas on the map as you wish. You can also change the style of the map and let you show the postalcodes or other different things.

In order to be able to use the tool to the fullest we will now guide you trough all the features of this page step by step below.

In the tour overview on the left side you are able to search for a specific tour and also see the different parameters for the tour (this is important for load balancing). You can scroll down in the list to see all your tours.

You can also select different tours to get them highlighted on the map. You see if a tour is selected by seeing the blue line around the tour on the left or by the blue colored area on the map.

In the tour overview on the left side you are able to search for a specific tour and also see the different parameters for the tour (this is important for load balancing). You can scroll down in the list to see all your tours.

You can also select different tours to get them highlighted on the map. You see if a tour is selected by seeing the blue line around the tour on the left or by the blue colored area on the map.

On the top right side on the map you can find the button “Edit Mode”. When you click this button you will enter the mode where you can change tour areas, tours and also add vehicles to each tour. You know have entered the edit mode when the map has a yellow box around it. In order for system to edit the changes you need to hit “Save” in the top right corner.

I order to create a new tour you have to enter the “Edit mode” with clicking on the button “Edit Mode” on the top right of the map.

You are in the “Edit mode” when you can see a yellow box around the map and the tour field on your screen.

To now create a new tour you have to press “+ Create new tour” in the tour menu on the left side of the screen.

After clicking this button a new field will appear on the screen.

In this next window you will be asked to type in all informations for the new tour that you are about to create.

The red fields are required fields that need to be filled with information or that need to be pressed.

First you have to enter a valid tour number of the subcontractor.

Blue field show fields that are not relevant to create a tour but they can prove handy down the road when it comes to load balancing or to have an overview of the loaded parcels and waypoints.

After entering all informations you need press “Create” in order to create the tour in the system.

You have now create a new tour. The next step will be to add this new tour on the map.

How to add this new tour on the map will be in a later step. Before we get to the point where you can draw your tour on the map we want to show a feature that is very important to draw a new tour on the map and which will also help you making the best decisions.

Historical data enables you to draw, create and edit new tours or already existing tours with the help of delivery data from a selected time frame. With these information about parcel volume, amount and stop amount planning new tours or changing existing tours gets easier, more transparent and faster. This enables you to use visualized data and knowledge to be more efficient with planning.

In order to unlock this potential you need to know where you can find the historical data in the tool. When on the tour plan page you have to not look anywhere else than right next to the tour list. At the top you can now switch to “historical data” and you are good to go.

After pressing on the button, can start by pressing on “Date range” to select a specific time frame. After pressing into the date range field a calendar will open. There you can select your timeframe. You can start with one day up to the last 30 days. After you have selected your time frame you need to click on “confirm” in order for the system to load the data. Depending on the amount of days you have select the longer it takes for the system to fetch and load the data.

The map should now look like this:

In the red rectangle you can now see the expected parcels volumes for the tours in your selected time frame. From left to right you have the following information: tour number, parcel amount, weight (this feature is not accurate at the moment), waypoints and stops.

On the right side you can see the map which has a lot of polygons in different colors displayed on it. These different colored areas show where parcels have been delivered in the selected time frame. The color is indicating how many where delivered. At the bottom of the page you can also the a color bar which tells you how many parcels have been delivered by color. It won’t give you the exact number as it just needs to indicate that it might me a big stop or something for an out of home tour.

But there is another option how to use historical data. In the first part we looked at the expected data but the expected data is hardly the reality. And for this case we have the “reality” tab which shows us how tours actually delivered the parcels.
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In order to access this part of the tool you just have to switch from “expected” to “reality” by pressing the “reality” button marked in red in the picture below.

You now can see the of the tour drove and delivered in reality. The numbers you can now see in the yellow box might differ from the numbers in the “expected” tab. But this is due to the fact that drivers don’t always follow the instructions by 100%.

After selecting the tour 2503 you now also get the tour area visualized on the map. All the deliveries the tour made are now highlighted in blue to better find them on the map. With this feature you can check if the driver delivers mainly in his tour area or not.

You are also able to zoom in to see the better where the driver has delivered parcels and also to see the borders of his tour area better.

The last feature in the historical data section is the debug mode that can be switched on if needed. This mode allows the user to see where tours have driven outside of their tour areas and delivered parcels.

In order to use this feature you need to be in the “reality” tab of the tool. Next to selection of “Expected” and “Reality” you can find the “Debug mode” (blue box). If you press the toggle switch next to the name you can turn on the Debug mode. A new column will now appear in the area for the tour informations. There you can switch the debug mode on and off for every single tour.

When switched on it will show you all deliveries of that tour that the driver delivered outside his tour area in a orange color. With this information you can identify where the driver leaves his tour area and can also see if a tour area needs some change.

This feature also enables you to see if drivers do stick to their tour number and area or if they are cherry picking the best parcels for them and them drive around the areas like crazy.

A tour plan is the base of our tool. The tour areas that are drawn in the tour plan are the geo tour numbers that will appear on the label that is on the parcel. This the point why it so important to have a meticulous created tour plan in the tool.

But how do even create a new tour plan or where can I find my active tour plan in the tool?

In order to access and edit a tourplan you need to look in the upper middle part of the page. There you can find the box with the description “ Current tour plan”. (here in the red box)

When you press somewhere in this box a dropdown menu will open and have this view as can be seen in the red box in the picture below.

In this menu you can see all created tour plans. You see plans from the past and the plan that is active at the moment.

You can create as many tour plans as you want. In our example you can see that the subcontractor has a lot of changes over the time. The newest plan is now activated. If you are sure that you don’t need an old tour plan you can also delete them. A name change of the plan is also always possible.

In order to active or delete a tour plan you have to click onto the setting icon on the right of the tour plan name. This will then open a new window where you can activate another tour plan or delete it.

⚠️ Important: After activating a new tour plan, you must click Save to apply the change. If you do not save it, the tour plan will not be activated.

ℹ️ Please note: After saving, it may take up to three days for all labels to display the new geo-tour number. This delay is caused by the GLS ShipIT integrations used by customers to create and print labels.

In order to create a new tour plan you need to press “create new tour plan” at the bottom of the drop down menu after clicking in the “current tour plan” box.

After pressing “+ Create new tour plan” you will automatically be transferred to the page in the picture below.

In order to create a new tour plan you have to enter the name of the new plan. After this you need to decide if you want to use an already existing tour plan to work with and create a new plan or if you want to create a new plan from scratch without any existing data from plans you made before. In this case you would need to create all tour from scratch and also draw every tour on the map.
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When you made your decision on which approach you want to take you have to press create to create this new tour plan. The new tour plan will not be automatically activated. After you finished the new plan you have to active it by your self like it is described above.

How does from “Scratch” look like in the tool?

To better understand the selections we have the options displayed for you below:

The Edit Mode

In the edit mode we have a variety of different tools to create tour areas on the map. Let me introduce you to them in the first place.

We have five tools in the edit mode that you will use on a regular basis when creating or editing tours or tour plans. So let us go trough them and see how to use them.

With this tool you can add an area on the map. Important here is that if you want to add an area on the map it needs to be linked to one of the tours from the tour list on the left of the page. So make sure that the tour you want to draw on the map is already added in the tour list.

Step 1: Create the tour in the tour list. A description on how to do this is at the top of this page.

Step 2: enter the edit mode

Step 3: Click on the symbol for adding area or click the key A on your keyboard.

You can see that you are using the “adding” tool when the icon is blacked out.

Step 4: Press the enter key to create the tour area the tool now opens a field for tour data. Here you need to select the tour from the drop down tour list in the pink square. After this you can name the tour as you like in the yellow square. After these two steps you need to click create in order to finalize the tour.

The tour creation is now finished.

In order to cut an area you first need to select an area while in the edit mode.

You can see that an area is selected by the dotted line and the black dots (see picture below). When the area is selected you press the C key to access the cutter. You know click the first dot outside of the selected tour and the last dot also needs to be outside the selected tour area. In between the first and the last dot can be as much dots as you want.

After you made your dots where you want to cut the area you simply press the enter key and two new area are created within the old tour are.

If you want to redraw an area or make a complete new tour area you can also delete an existing tour area in you plan. To delete the area you just need to select the area.

In order to delete the selected are you just have to press the D key on your keyboard or simply press on the trashcan in the edit menu on the top.

Afterwards the map should look like this.

in the tool you have the option to decide what you want to see on the map. For this we have the feature that you can toggle the features how you like it. You can switch of to see the tour areas, the parcels in historical data mode, you can have the postal codes shown on the map or not and also you can see where the depot is located if you want.