Auto Routing is available in our Pro Plan.
Watch this video:
Summary
Auto Routing is a powerful tool that pulls appointments from your Work Pool and non-confirmed appointments and creates an optimized route around your confirmed appointments. It is used in conjunction with Google. When you set up your criteria we send it to Google for the optimization. Google analyses the data and sends it back.
Key Points
Click the Route icon in the upper-right corner of the Calendar
Follow along with the parameters mentioned below
Beware of the caveats, especially in that once accepted it cannot be undone
In the Calendar, in the upper-right corner, click the Route icon
Automated Routing parameters
Starting/End Date: Enter the start and end dates.
Start time: Enter the start time, number of stops per day, lunch break...
[ ] Include scheduled work orders: If you select this, the routing will include your Work Pool and your non-confirmed appointments
[ ] Keep work orders with assigned technician: If you select this, the routing will not be as well optimized for efficiency of time or distance
If Keep work orders with assigned technician is clear, you'll see Number of routes:Number of Routes
⦁ Create a route for each technician: all techs will be out on the road.
⦁ Assign based on best fit: optimizes according to appointment location.
If Keep work orders with assigned technician is selected:[ ] Ignore existing day/date: This is a complete rerouting of the schedule.
Tolerance: identifies how many days before and after to optimize the route. For example, if an appointment is scheduled for a Wednesday, and you select a 1 day tolerance, the optimization range will pick Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. If you select 7 days, then the optimization range will be the week before, the current week, and the week after.
Optimization method:
Best driving route: optimizes for best fit based on distance between each address. It favors reduced driving distance over even distribution of appointments.
Evenly distribute work: will spread work evenly over the date range. Driving routes are not as well optimized.Click Start Routing Optimization.
Go to your email & open the mail with the subject: Routing results for <start date/end date>, click Preview
In the upper-left corner, click Calendar and click List View
In this list you can see the Last Service Date, Original Date (of service before you clicked the Start Routing button) and the Optimized date
Print this list and compare/contrast it to what you have on the schedule
If you don't like what you see, go back to the Calendar and start over using different parameters. Open the email, click Preview, click Calendar and click List View, and print again.
We recommend that you print 3 or 4 different scenarios. Analyze them closely, compare and contrast the results, and manually make the changes in the Calendar.
Caveats:
Routing has to dance around variables like confirmed appointments, arrival time windows, quantity of same-start times, etc. The more you have of these types of appointments sprinkled through out the day the less likely you're going to get an optimized route
That said, we have no definitive list as to what works and what doesn't. It's all in how the variables interplay with Google's Magic Eight Ball.
Ideally it's best to start small when first trying this feature, no more than three days.
Assign based on best fit: This will probably push all the appointments to the beginning (start date). If you have 3 days with 20 appointments, and 8 appointments a day, the first 2 days will fill up completely and the third day will have 4 appointments.
If you're optimizing just one day, go into day view in the Calendar and click the clock icon at the top of a tech's route. (If an appointment reminder has been set for any appointment on that tech's route you won't be able to optimize it.)
When going through your 3 or 4 printouts highlight which changes you want to make on each of the pages. Go through the Calendar and mentally make each change to see if it makes sense before actually making the change.
If you receive an error message saying it's unable to create a route, routing has the following problems. It won't work if the time between last appointment and next appointment is greater than one month. Complete the Work Orders and try again.
Don't have your jobs start at the same time on any given day. Stagger your start times.
The calendar routing limitations is 23 appointments per day.
This powerful feature can do exactly what you tell it to. We recommend that you do not click Apply Results unless you are 100% satisfied that this new routing will meet your needs.
If you click Apply Results and don't like what you see, you have go back and manually return the schedule to what you had before.