Overview
Route planning helps you to plan lots of repeated task in a way that minimizes driving.
F.ex. you may have 100 tasks that are planned for an employee in next week, in no particular order, and you want find an efficient way of assigning the tasks to each, to minimize the time spent driving, then you can use the Directions module to suggest the route. This is available in the Planning module, in PLANNING > Route planning.
The Directions module cannot handle arbitrary amount of data, the suggested routes start to become useless when you have much more than approx. 100 plannings.
Notice that the Directions module doesn't save any data in Microbizz until at the very end, so you can experiment and fine tune the planning until you are satisfied, and then save.
Suggesting routes
When you enter the Directions module you can select a period (up to 31 days) and 1 or 2 users. We currently do not recommend that you try it with more than approx 10-15 days of work, eg. 1 user in 2 weeks or 2 users in 1 week.
Click on the Show button and all the existing planning for the users in the period will be display on the map. You will get a warning if any of the planned tasks are not geocode.
In this case all planning is on the Monday. Each days has a different colour, Monday is red; the colours can be seen in the small calendar below the Show button. If a date is bold that means there is a planning on that date:
Click on the Suggest planning button and Microbizz will start calculating a suitable route.
Adjusting the routes
You may click on a date in the small calendar - this will open a dialog box showing a list of the plannings for that date.
If you click on multiple dates then they will be shown next to each other. You may then drag plannings from one date to another, or you may reorder that plannings within a date.
At the bottom of the dialog box you will find information about the estimated driving time, the work day duration, and the duration of the planned work. Above that are two icons: one of recalculating an efficient route between the plannings for that date, and one for locking the date. When you lock a date, Microbizz will not assign new plannings to it when you click on the Suggest planning button.
Multiple users
If you specify two users then the plannings for both users will be shown on the map, and the plannings for one user may be moved to the other user, depending on restrictions (see below).
Restrictions
The route planner takes the user's work plan and work day duration into account.
If a planning is locked then the planning will remain on the same date, but it may be moved to another time.
In the Task module you will find a new tab RESTRICTIONS. This allows you to specify various restrictions for the tasks that are used by the route planner, eg. that the task should only be planned on certain week days.
Save planning
Microbizz doesn't save any of the hanges until you click on the Save planning button.
Profiles
The Profiles menu at the top allows you to create and manage profiles. A profile contains a number of settings that determine how the routes are calculated. This way you can easily update the profile to see if that makes a significant change to the routes.
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Troubleshooting Route Planning