Optimize Technician Route for Salt Deliveries

[AHennager]

What is Optimize Technician Route? 

Optimize Technician Route re-routes technician jobs for the day more efficiently, allowing your business to complete more work with fewer technicians. Two clicks on the Dispatch Board automatically minimizes drive time using average traffic speeds. Optimize Technician Route schedules jobs around existing commitments, including non-job events and confirmed jobs, so you don’t have to!


When to use Optimize Technician Route 

Optimize Technician Route is most effective for businesses that run large numbers of jobs with flexible arrival windows.

For example, a Water Treatment organization relying on a single technician to complete 20-60 salt delivery stops in a single day and who offer 8-hour arrival windows to their customers can increase revenue and efficiency by leveraging the route optimization algorithm offered by Optimize Technician Route.

Optimize Technician Route is less effective for businesses that give smaller arrival windows (2-3 hours), or that only run 1-3 jobs per day. The more flexibility Optimize Technician Route has to create effective routes, the more it can drive efficiency and revenue.

It is best when a technician is on their own or with the same crew of technicians for the entire day. If a technician is on a job on their own in the morning and with other technicians in the afternoon and you optimize that technician's route, the shared job may be rescheduled causing a scheduling conflict for the other technicians.


Set up Optimize Technician Route 

In order to use Optimize Technician Route, be sure you have added validated addresses for all technicians. The optimized route for a technician starts from the technician’s validated address, which almost always should be their home address.

For more on how to add an address to a technician profile, see Edit a profile.

The service location addresses for the jobs must also be validated in order to be added to an optimized route. If none of the jobs are for validated service addresses, you are notified that there are no jobs to optimize. To learn more, see Edit a service location record.


Use Optimize Technician Route 

1. Go to the navigation bar and click Dispatch.

2. Click the technician whose route you’d like to optimize. From the menu, select Optimize Technician Route:

Track the optimization using the progress bar:

3. When optimization is complete, you see a confirmation and the updated Dispatch Board. The jobs that have been scheduled based on the optimized route show a lightning bolt icon:

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Interested in learning more about Optimize Technician Route?
Reach out to your Customer Success Manager for more information! 🙂

[mbordine]

ST does not optimize more then 30stops for salt delivery.  I work at American Aqua, and the routing has been a constant thorn in our side.  The Optimization does NOT pick the best/fastest route.  We have had several people look into this with no answers.  Each time they say they put us in a new routing way, but then it doesn't make any difference.

Also, this system does not put the deliveries in a route...  We need a system that will put the tickets in order per the area they are in for reoccurring.  So all Howell needs to be Thursdays, All Detroit needs to be the 2nd Tuesday every 4 weeks.  

We wish the Routing was bigger and better then what it is and what we were promised!

@Steven @AHennager 

[AHennager]

Thanks for reaching out, @mbordine!

I'm sorry to hear about the difficulties you've been facing with Optimize Technician Route's functionality. I can understand your frustrations here! Our team will follow through on a resolution. 

I connected with your account's Customer Success Manager and made him aware of your feedback. I also connected with our Engineers who lead Optimize Technician Route (OTR) and made them aware of your experience thus far.

I also understand you've been in contact with our Support Team regarding this situation for a while now. Our Support Team will be reaching out to you again if they haven't already! We would love to take a deeper dive into some recent examples of routes that aren't optimizing appropriately.

For context, I recently worked with an account who faced some similar difficulties with OTR and their salt delivery routes. They also weren't impressed with the results they were seeing from OTR, but I was adamant on resolving the issue together. We took several examples of routes that weren't routing appropriately and provided them directly to our engineers. The collaborative effort resulted in some enhancements with the algorithm + adjustments with their account configurations to ensure qualitative results in the optimization process. Since then, they've been using OTR for their salt delivery efforts and are often optimizing 50-60 salt delivery stops in a single day for a single technician!

(I've personally reached out to the account I'm speaking about and asked them to comment on this post to share their experience with you directly)

For creating specific salt delivery routes based on certain days, I would recommend utilizing tags on Service Locations and/or Zones as a way of filtering Recurring Service Events in the Follow Up screen. Both options will allow you to quickly isolate Recurring Service Events based on a preferred grouping. From there, you can "Select All" on the filtered Recurring Service Events and bulk book the events into scheduled jobs. We can then leverage Optimize Technician Route thereafter to ensure the scheduled jobs are optimized into an efficient route.

Be sure to reach out to your CSM so we can make sure we get you on the right path! 🙂

Once again, thanks again for your comment and feel free to contact me personally if you have any other questions or concerns! I'm always happy to help.

-Adam

[Dmoles]

Dan from Advanced Water Systems here, I’m the person Adam referenced above…

Mbordine, I feel your pain because I’ve been there.  We have 2,200 customers on a salt route and do 50-70 deliveries per day per technician.  It can be done, so don’t give up.  ST has made a lot of improvements to the optimizer since we started with the program 2 years ago.  We ran our salt deliveries outside of ST for the first year because it didn’t work well enough, then eventually gave up and integrated a 3rd party route optimizer.  I think it hurt ST’s ego and they put some engineers on the problem and made some big improvements to the algorithm, good enough to make us switch back.    

It's still not a great optimizer, but it is open source and you get what you pay for.  If you want what UPS uses expect to pay $250 a month for it. 

We overcame the limitations of the optimizer by creating tight zones that didn’t cross main highways…we literally drew our zones on a map and tagged each customer’s location with the zone they were in.  We book all the delivery jobs in bulk using the zone tags, it’s the best way to create the routes you need.  Example, you would create a tag that says “Zone - Detroit Monthly” and tag all the locations on that route, then once a month you would bulk book everyone with that tag.

Google has some really great features that helped us too, there is a way to upload an excel file with all your salt route stops and see them on one map.  This helped us design the zones with roughly 120 customers in each. You can see it here: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1q7NGfpMgjVlZPmYFuZtyXQL__Rl_jsPG&usp=sharing

Hopefully this gives you some hope.  Feel free to contact me with questions.