Good to know

Tourplanning+ works within some real limits. This page collects them in one place. Nothing here loses your data. These are things the module does not do yet, not things that go wrong.

What the algorithm needs, without exception

A stop missing any of these cannot be optimised. This is the most common reason a plan looks wrong.

A locatable address on every task and planning, and on every employee. Without a location there is no distance to calculate.

An estimate on every task, so the algorithm knows how much of a day it consumes.

One country at a time. Everything in a single optimisation must be in the same country.

Roughly 1,500 stops is the ceiling for one optimisation. Beyond that, narrow the period or the group of employees and optimise in more than one pass.

Locked stops can produce odd-looking gaps

Locking is honoured absolutely, which occasionally produces a plan that looks wasteful but is correct.

Say a stop is locked to 08:30, the working day starts at 08:00, and everything that day takes an hour. Leaving 08:00 to 08:30 idle would be wasteful, so the algorithm puts another stop at 08:00 to 09:00 and leaves the locked one at 08:30 to 09:30. The transport time between them is minus thirty minutes.

That negative number is the screen telling you the plan cannot physically be driven, rather than hiding the conflict. If you see negative transport time in red, something is locked into a position that leaves no time to get there.

Calendar appointments are never moved

Appointments are shown in the routes and planned around, but they are always locked. You cannot drag them, and the auto-plan will not move them regardless of the leg's own lock state. They cannot be edited from Tourplanning+ either, so change them where they were created.

An appointment's location comes from its place field. If that field holds something that is not a place, such as “Teams meeting”, the appointment appears in the route in the right position but has no pin on the map.

What is not there yet

Users are not listed alphabetically, unlike Planning+. With many employees this makes finding somebody slower.

Task filters do not always behave as expected. A filter on the title may return nothing, and OR conditions on the address field do not filter reliably. If a filter returns less than you expect, check the result against the task list.

Editing a filter from the task panel is cramped. The window is too small, the task list inside it does not scroll, and applying the filter does not always take effect. Editing filters in the task module is more reliable for now.

Transport time can differ by a minute or two between the route view and the overview before you optimise. The route view is the one to trust.

Two things worth being deliberate about

A locked day can report success when nothing was saved. If you lock a day, then add a task and optimise and save, you may be told the plannings were saved even though the lock prevented it. Unlock the day, or verify it afterwards, before relying on the result.

An employee with no home address will stop an optimisation. Rather than skipping that person, the run reports an error. If optimisation fails and the message is not obvious, check that everybody in the selection has an address.

Where the costs come from

Most of what the algorithm decides comes down to the cost settings: what an hour is worth, what a kilometre is worth, what overtime is worth. These are yours to tune, and they change the answer substantially. Check Settings before concluding the algorithm is wrong. More often it is doing exactly what the costs told it to.

If something on this page blocks the way you want to work, tell us. It helps us prioritise.