Continuous Improvements Routing Plan

A new option has been added to the Routing Plan configuration - Routing Schedule > Run Routing: Continuous Improvement.  This routing plan option constantly optimizes resource routes based on either new activities coming to the bucket, new abilities to assign activities to existing routes or the fact that an existing activity is in jeopardy.  This capability can be used instead of schedule-based routing runs, providing a new level of "just here, just now" optimization.

For Continuous improvement routing runs, you cannot choose Interval between runs in minutes, Total run time or SLR time distribution, as those values will be defined automatically. Also, since the 23B release, such type of routing is only available for single day and current day. Some other options like Dynamic Routing and Try to schedule activities to service window start are also not available for On Demand runs.

While Continuous improvement runs support optimization, you may not choose criteria for when the run should be started, and there is no acceptance criteria - the results are always accepted.

Use Case

Let's imagine we have a company working with fitness equipment. The vast majority of activities for today come from the ERP system at about 06:00, while technicians start their work no earlier than 07:00. Intraday activities come at a rate of approximately 20 per hour from 07:00 to 16:00 and should be assigned immediately in a way that optimizes travel, due to high gas prices. A very small amount of urgent activities should be routed immediately with no optimization, as the only criteria is the time to complete. All the activities left in the bucket or on routes at 18:00 should be moved to the next day.

In this case, the recommended set of routing plans would be:

• Morning Routine - Once a Day routing plan at 06:05 to route all the activities to all technicians.
• Urgent Routing - Immediate routing plan for Urgent activities from 07:00 to 16:30.
• Intraday Routing - On Demand routing plan from 07:00 to 16:30, with a filter that does not reorder Urgent activities along with a 'Minimize Total Travel' goal selected.
• Evening Routine - Once a Day multiday routing plan (2 days from today) at 17:00 to route activities from today to tomorrow.
• Manual Routing - A special routing plan to re-route activities manually may be created if needed.

1. The feature provides faster and more efficient activity assignment similar to an Immediate routing plan, while providing the optimization level of a Bulk routing plan.
2. If an activity is in jeopardy, the Continuous improvement plan may automatically reschedule it to return it back to normal operation.
3. If an activity is manually moved during a long Bulk routing run, conflicts in the merging operation may be automatically resolved via the Continuous improvement routing plan.

Steps to Enable

To start using the functionality, create a new routing plan and choose Continuous Improvement for Routing Schedule > Run Routing.

NOTE: Please note that the Continuous improvement run is available only for single day and current day. Also, you may not have more than a single Continuous improvement run per routing profile at any given moment.  For example, if you define one On Demand run - Every Day, 00:00 - 24:00 - you will not be able to add any more On Demand runs to that profile.  It is not recommended to have other types of routing runs (with the only exception of Immediate Routing for Urgent activities) at the same time while Continuous improvement routing is planned.

If Continuous improvement option is chosen, for every optimization goal there will be criteria regarding when the run should be started, as follows:

• The re-optimization will only be started if it has the ability to assign more activities or the route can be further optimized in some way.

The run starts as soon as the running conditions are satisfied at the particular bucket (i.e. when new activities were added to the bucket and/or some activities that are already on the route are cancelled or are in jeopardy). If routing was not able to improve the situation from the very first time, then no new attempts are to be made until there are more activities added/cancelled or in jeopardy.

If there are Immediate routing runs scheduled at the same time with Continuous improvement (while it is not recommended), Immediate runs will run first and then On Demand ones will be triggered. Any other bulk routing plan type (e.g. manual, recurrent, once a day) will not pause Continuous improvement plans from the start until it finishes; however, the Continuous improvement plans may be started to route activities that came after the bulk routing plan started.

 

   

Tips And Considerations

The Continuous improvement plan may run only for today.  Options for Dynamic Routing and Try to schedule activities to service window start are not available for Continuous improvement runs. The option of Use resource outside of routing bucket is also unavailable for the Continuous improvement run type.