Optimizing

Optimising hands the people, the period and the work to the algorithm, which returns an arrangement that costs less driving than the one you had.

Before you run it

The panel along the bottom shows what the run will consider, for example “12 tasks to plan and 4 users to plan for”. Check it first. It catches the two common mistakes: nobody selected, or the tasks you meant to include still sitting outside the unplanned area.

Running it

Press Run auto-plan. The work is sent to the optimisation service, which weighs every combination of employee, day and order against your cost settings and returns the cheapest arrangement it can find.

The result appears immediately in the calendar, on the map and in the route view.

Nothing has been saved at this point. What you are looking at is a proposal. Leave the page and it is gone. Press Reload and you are back to what was stored. Only Save commits it.

Reading the result

Check four things, in this order:

What ended up unplanned. Anything the algorithm could not place is in the unplanned area. This is the work that will not happen unless you do something about it.

The days that changed most. The auto-plan log shows what moved and where it came from.

Negative transport times. Shown in red, these mean a stop cannot be reached in time, almost always because something is locked into place.

Any overnight stays. If the algorithm has decided somebody should stay away, a divider marks it in the route and the next day starts from where they stopped. Worth a look if your people do not normally stay out, since it usually means the work is further away than the day allows. See Settings and priority groups.

Why stops come back unplanned

There was not enough working time in the period

Widen the period, add people, or plan the rest later.

The stop would have cost more than the planning cost limit allows

Raise that limit if the work is worth doing anyway. See Settings and priority groups.

The task is missing an address or an estimate

Fix the task. The algorithm cannot place what it cannot measure.

Locked stops left no room

Unlock what does not need to be fixed in place, and run again.

Adjusting the result by hand

You will sometimes know something the algorithm does not, such as a customer expecting a particular person, or two jobs that are best done together. The proposal is yours to edit.

Drag a stop from one leg to another to give it to somebody else or move it to a different day, and drag stops within a leg to change their order. The routes and the times redraw as you go, so you can see what your change costs.

If you want the algorithm to respect your decision on the next run, lock the stop before running again.

The auto-plan log

The Auto-plan log tab records what the last run did. It lists each change:

Moved from one employee to another, naming both.

Moved to a different time or a different date, with the old and new values.

Scheduled for a date and an employee, where something previously unplanned found a home.

Moved to an unplanned state, where something previously planned did not survive.

Alongside the list are the totals before and after, so you can see whether the new plan is actually better than the old one.

The log fills in after a run. Before you have optimised anything in the current session it says so.

Saving

Press Save when you are satisfied. Until then, Reload discards everything on screen and returns you to what is stored.

If you have locked a day, saving may report success even though the lock prevented the new plannings from being written. Check locked days after saving before relying on the result.

Letting it run overnight

Repeated loose tasks reopen during the night, and Tourplanning+ can replan them automatically for nominated teams before anybody arrives in the morning. It uses the same optimisation and the same cost settings as a run you do by hand. The difference is that nobody reviews the result first. See Settings and priority groups.