Fine-tune a Routing Plan

You can set the Assignment Parameters to further configure or fine-tune the routing plan to achieve specific goals such as creating an inventory pickup activity or creating the activities close to the service window start time.

To set assignment parameters:

1. Navigate to the Routing screen and locate the routing plan to which you want to configure.
2. Click Actions and select Modify to open the Edit Routing Plan screen.
3. Expand the Assignment Parameters section.
4. Select the following options, as necessary:

   • Enable Routing by Inventory: When this check box is selected, routing considers the required inventories for all activities that are sent to routing, and assigns activities only to those resources that can meet these requirements. This could result in some activities being unassigned. Activities which have no inventory requirements are not affected by this setting. They are routed in the same way as before. Activities are unassigned if there are no resources that meet their inventory requirements. Such activities are rejected with the reason code: 6003 and message: no appropriate resources. Regular activity filters and resource filters, work zone, work skill restrictions apply as usual. For example, if a resource which has the inventory X is not selected by a filter for the activity that requires inventory X, then that activity is not assigned to that resource.

   • Enable Inventory Pickup: Bulk routing may auto-create an inventory pickup activity to obtain the required inventory pieces from the nearest warehouse and handle the changes during intra-day routing re-optimization runs. This increases the autorouted percentage value and improves the routing quality as the same mobile worker completes more activities.

   • Dynamic Routing: This option helps you set the limits on how long the module runs based on the number of minutes and/or the number of activities routed. The screenshot (below) shows a different location for setting minutes/activities (described as the Dynamic Routing check box of the Add/Edit routing plan dialog box):

     
     
     
   • Limit work by points: Select the box to enable Routing to limit how many activities mobile workers can have in their routes. Note the following:

     • Overload by points may still happen if an activity was added to the route or updated after routing was performed.

     • Routing will not remove previously-assigned activities back to bucket nor assign to another resource if a route was already overloaded before the Routing run.

     • Zero points activities may be assigned to any resource, including but not limited to, resources with already overloaded routes and resources that have zero or negative points capacity.

   • Try to schedule activities to service window start:This option (formerly named Route Uniformity) schedules activities as close to the start of service windows as possible. As a result, routing options will typically include a broader selection of resources and the possibility of burdening some resources with many activities and under-utilizing others is minimized. Note, however, the following consequences are there:

     • Idle time may collect closer to the end of the service window.

     • Summary travel time may increase.

     • Summary work time may increase.

   • Override default service window reservation value: Select this check box to enable modification of service window reservation. Default Service window reservation is up to 20% of the service window but no more than 60 minutes. See 'Service window reservation %' description for more details

   • Service window reservation %: This field determines the percentage of the service window from its end that must be reserved. Routing tries to avoid assigning activities with ETA within the reserved part of their service windows by pushing the activities to an earlier ETA. Routing tries to push the activity to an earlier ETA as higher is the late arrival penalty for this activity. This setting applies to all the activities that are part of the routing plan.

     For example, an activity has a service window from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM:

     • If 15% is specified in the Service window reservation % field, the last 63 minutes of this 420 minutes service window are reserved.

     • If 50% is specified in the Service window reservation % field, 210 minutes are reserved.

     Higher Service window reservation % increases the 'buffer time', which may result in the degradation of the other metric.

     Lower percentage may result in a higher risk of resource appears to be late for the appointment.

     Note: Service Window Reservation % is not applied (its effective value is 0%) when (a) bundling the activities on the same address or (b) having the same bundling key and assigned to same mobile worker for activities starting from second one in the bundle. For bundled activities, both SLA and Service Window are calculated by the start of the first activity in the bundle.

   • Center point home zone support: This option defines the home zone radius, that is, the number of miles in any direction from the starting point and the penalty to be applied if a resource must leave the home zone to complete an activity. The default penalty (Overstep Weight) is 4.

   • Automatic ordering: This option places activities without service windows on the route in the most efficient order. If cleared, the application places these activities on the route, but does not assign a time slot. In this case, resources decide when to do the work.

     Automatic Ordering can help you complete more activities over the course of the day, but it also reduces the resources’ ability to use their own judgement in completing activities.

   • Limit work by points: This option is only necessary if you use points to estimate activities. It limits the number of activities assigned to a resource based on the maximum points allowed within a resource’s shift. You must also enable Points Support in Business Rules, enable a Points property, and send the point value for the activity through the API.

   • Move activities to the bucket instead of assignment to contractor's resource: This option assigns the relevant activities to a contractor’s bucket instead of the contractor’s resource. For this option to work, you must run the plan from an In-house Organization bucket that has contractor buckets (and, possibly, in-house ones) as children. In this case activities routed to in-house mobile workers will be assigned to mobile workers, but activities routed to contractor mobile workers will be assigned to contractor buckets. However, if you run the plan from a contractor bucket, the activities will be assigned to the underlying contractor mobile workers.

     Note: Routing runs that assign or reassign all activities to the contractor's personnel will be moved to the parent bucket of such resources, regardless of the optimization destination selected. To prevent activities that are already assigned to the contractor resources before the routing run, of being taken from contractor's resources to the bucket, select the Do not move activities between routes and do not reorder activities for Handling of preassigned activities check box.
   When you close Assignment Parameters, you’ll see your selections summarized on screen.