Salt and Water Delivery Routes

[culligan]

Wondering what those of you who do salt and water deliveries are doing for route balancing and scheduling. We currently have routes set up as recurring services and use a route # tag to identify customers on a specific route during the target time frame. 

There has to be a better way to manage this that I am just missing. From what I can tell the problems stem from the recurring services needing to land on a specific day. (you check the box next to a day when adding the recurring service and then it is set to that day every 4-6-8 weeks what ever frequency you choose) Because of closed business days/holidays this causes the routes to "shift" 1 day at a time and not allow us to book recurring services on the actual day they are scheduled.

We are getting frustrated with the need to request a data task from service titan to export all of our recurring service events and send them to a 3rd party for optimization (reassigning route # tags and next delivery dates) only to send that information back to service titan and wait for it to be uploaded.

Any help would be greatly appreciated I bring this up to every single service titan employee i interact with and have yet to come across a service titan employee who even knows what "routes" are in terms of salt and water delivery.

[AHennager]

@culligan 

Hi Justin! Thanks for posting your inquiry in ServiceTitan Community.

Check out the Optimize Technician Route for Salt Deliveries blog post in Water Treatment User Group.

In the comments on that blog post, Dan with Advanced Water Systems shares his experience with another user relating to the topic. You may find insights into their process that's described there. Feel free to reach out to Dan directly within the comments of that post as well.

Taking a look at your Recurring Service Types in your account, I can see that the Recurring Service Type for Salt Delivery is configured by default with a "Weekly" Recurrence Type and a Recurrence Interval value of 26.

"Weekly" requires that you select one or more Recurrence Days when adding the Recurring Service onto a Service Location. 

You'll notice that if you select another Recurrence Type, such as "Monthly" or "Daily", you won't see the Recurrence Days option as being available or required when adding a Recurring Service onto a Service Location.

 
There's a couple of other ways we can configure the Recurring Service Type for Salt Delivery, while still achieving the same recurring cadence as Weekly/26, such as:

Recurrence Type = Daily
Recurring Interval  = 182

Recurrence Type = Monthly
Recurring Interval  = 6

These alternate settings may be worth exploring.

Personally, I like configuring Recurring Service Types with the "Daily" Recurrence Type since we then have an option to Auto-adjust events based on previous completion date.

Looking forward to your feedback!

Best,
Adam

[culligan]

@AHennager

Thanks for the reply. I was not aware that setting things weekly is what triggered the "day of week" setting. I will discuss this with my CSM and see if we can change everyone in the system to daily.

I think making the change to daily will really help clean things up. It will not fix the holiday issue i originally described, but its a great step in the right direction.

[n_bertra]

Three years running hasnt fixed the holiday issue, Our delivery routes have had to rely on manual processes and external programs this entire time. Old system could make this work intuativly, but we have not had any luck with it.

[AHennager]

@n_bertra @culligan 

It looks like the holiday aspect was recently called out in an Idea submission found here:
COMMUNITY-I-3504

Feel free to share this link with your respective teams and upvote it as much as possible!

Best,
Adam

[e_dunn]

Hi @culligan - This is a great question! @AHennager or @BrandonMantel do you have any suggestions?

Also, be sure to check out the Water Treatment User Group to connect with other folks in the water treatment industry.