Learn the basics of tour creation to ensure tours are properly created in an efficient and timely fashion.
A core capability of the Route Optimization system is to create pre-assigned and dynamic tours for orders on a given delivery day. These tours are created in the most efficient manner based on orders volume and resource availability.
Important Items to take note of:
- A Service Area must exist for tours to be created
- For an order to show up in the DMS, an order needs a tour
- Orders must be scheduled onto a Service Area for tours to be created
- For static tours to be created, the order must be scheduled onto an Assigned Route instead of just a Service Area
- For tours to be generated dynamically, a tour plan must be built for orders on a Service Area
- A Tour has one Service Area
Table of Contents
What is a Tour?
A tour is a set of orders on a particular day (either dynamically generated or pre-assigned to an Assigned Route) intended to be delivered by a single driver. Tours are meant to represent the plan which a potential deliverer can follow for delivery, however, it is NOT the current representation of the state of delivery. Below you can see generated tours that can potentially be adjusted and manipulated for delivery.
NOTE! If you are looking to check the real time representation of the state of delivery of a tour, please visit the War Room Map interface. The War Room Map provides real-time updates of the current state of delivery for tours.
How is a tour created?
A tour can be created in two ways:
1. If the Delivery Option of orders are on an Assigned Route, a tour for that assigned route is created on the scheduled day for orders created on the Assigned Route.
2. If the Delivery Option of orders are on a Service Area, tours are created dynamically through the build tour plan process upon a user's request. Orders are organized within those tours as optimally as possible.
Once a Tour has been generated from the Service Area optimizations of orders these Tours and Assigned Routes tours behave in similar fashion for sequencing.
WHO NEEDS TO CREATE A TOUR?
A user that is looking to deliver orders via DMS must have a tour created in the system. Although users can still deliver orders via DCT if no tour is created, however, if no tours exist, it wouldn’t be possible for orders to show up on DMS. This is why it's highly recommended to plan out the way you would like your tours to get created; either by the dynamic or assigned methods in order to plan order delivery.
WHY DOES A USER NEED A TOUR?
A user requires a tour for different reasons, one important reason is that tours allow users to plan the way they want to deliver their orders. Existing tours can be manipulated and planned to fit the user’s operational needs.