Trakker’s SMART Routing AI makes routing simple, while helping to ensure all none of your customers are missed and are being seen in an efficient manner.
Quick Overview of SMART Routing AI
If SMART Routing AI is turned on, then each evening the ScheduledTrakkerTasks.exe. It will select a starting customer for the day and, using 1,000’s of points of data, will build the rest of that day’s route based upon the nearest customer to them with an upcoming due date.
The 1st customer is decided as follows
- Manually entered appointments
- Recurring Events set for that day are loaded
- The customer with the shortest Route Days with an Upcoming or Overdue date
Once the first customer is assigned the remainder of the day is filled out by looking for customer that have upcoming due dates near the customers already added to the day’s route.
Are there any recommendations on the number of days to set a customer route
Yes, if you can set up dates so that they will regularly be expected to be grouped together that can make many things easier.
Trying to set up your customer base with one of the following date types can really help
- 30, 60, 90, 120, 150, 180, 360
- days works well only seeing once a month, but the day of the week will move
- 7, 14, 28, 56, 84, 112, 140, 168, 364
- This works great for seeing the customers every, 1, 2, 4, 8… weeks and works to keep them on the same day of the week. It also adds a 13th month to your year for 28 day customers
Try not to blend all kinds of variations such as 7, 14, 28, 30, 70, 77, 84… these start making required dates between customer really conflict and often end up requiring lots of extra driving at seemingly random parts of the year.
Are the number of routing days weighted?
Yes.
n order to be able to group as many close together addresses together in a tight group with approximate due dates together a formula is needed to allow an Earliest Due date to be set that a customer can be seen. That formula is a follows.
- All customers with Number of Routing Days set to <29 can not be seen before that day time frame. This sets up so that in most situations, if a customer is set to 7, 14, 21, or 28 days, they will be seen on that day. (Note: 28 day accounts may be seen twice in one month)
- 29– 31 can be seen up to 2 days early (NOTE: CAN NOT be seen twice in the same month).
- 32 – 34 can be seen up to 3 days early
- 35 – 149 days can be seen 4 – 18 days early (weighted at .88)
- 150 – 179 can be seen 15 – 18 days early (weighted at .)
- 180 – 359 can be seen 18 days early
- 350 DAYS SPECIAL NOTE: Some external systems can not set their systems route days to 0, so as a work around for those systems, they set it for either 50 Weeks (which converts to 350 days) or 350 days. So 350 days will add 25,550 days to the last invoice so that it will not load to a route (giving it the same result as if it were set to 0 route days)
- > 360 can be seen 28 days early
Is there a report showing the Next Due Dates and Weighted Next dates?
Yes.
In the Trakker Reports it is called Customer Last Invoice By Rep.
This report can sorted and search by any of the fields. A popular way to filter and sort it is:
- Filter by truck (LocationName) and
- Filter Route Days > 0 (Because any customer with routing days of 0 will not be added to the route)
- Sort by Earliest Date or Next Due Date
- Earliest Date is the [Last Invoice Date] + [Weighted Route Days]
- Next Due Date is the [Last Invoice Date] + [Route Days]
This report also shows the Upcoming Appt date if one has already been scheduled.
How can I see the route?
The route appears on the schedule under each truck/reps name. It shows the calculated start time for each customer appointment and the length of time estimated for each appointment.
Also from the Handheld Data tab the calendar can be switched to the desired date and the Scheduled box can be selected from the Top Right hand side of the screen to show what the route looks like on a map.
What if something goes wrong? Can I run the nightly Scheduled Trakker Tasks again?
Yes.
If something goes wrong, such as a customer address causes an issue because it is very poorly formatted, the entire customer data can be fixed and the process can be re-run.
It will leave what was already done alone, and it will load up from where it left of. That means that if any Recurring Events were already loaded, they will not get double loaded, and the SMART Routing AI will continue right where it left off loading up a route.
Can I manually add or remove an appointment on the route?
Remove Appointment.
Simply open the appointment in question an check the Inactive checkbox and save it.
Or you can move it to another date by changing the Specific Time to the date (and a time frame) desired
Add an Appointment.
To add an appointment to today’s schedule (or tomorrow or next weeks…) follow these steps from the customer Tab, or if you prefer to use the Customer WIzard followed by the Re-Optimize steps below
Via the Customer
- Go to the customer tab
- Find the desired customer and open them
- From the menu on top click Schedule Appointment
- This will open the schedule and will fill the customer’s service address in the address area on the bottom
- Make sure the date on the calendar is the desired target date
- Find the desired handheld and time slot on the calendar.
- Double click in a blank area on the HH’s schedule for that day
- Fill in any additional desired/required information
- Check that the Specific Time’s Date and Start and End times are correct, or fix
- Save and close
- Follow the Re-Optimize steps below
- To RE-OPTIMIZE the Route…
- Click into an open area of that HH’s schedule (so there is a blue box on it
- Right click an select OPTIMIZE SCHEDULE
- A pop up will appear to confirm you wanted to re-optimize. Answer Yes
What if a customer does not want us to visit them right now even though they are due?
What will happen? Well if they do not wish to be visited right then and nothing is done on the handheld, then the account will keep aging and thus keep moving up in priority on the schedule and keep getting rebooked over and over until something is done.
There are several ways in which this can be handled, but here are a few of the simpilist.
- Generate a $0 invoice for this customer so that the next due date will be calculated from the date of this $0 invoice
- OR the non-completed appointment for this customer can be moved to a date in the future say a week or two ( or three or…) out so that the SMART Routing AI will see that the customer has an upcoming appointment already so will not keep booking it.
- OR if there is no existing non-completed appointment, just create a new appointment for this customer for a future date just like in #2.
- Change the # of route days for the customer, if they desire to be seen less often on a regular basis
How do I get started with SMART Routing AI for Trakker?
Contact us to and we can get you set up with First Aid Trakker and start saving your team time and money today.
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