Scheduling
Plan the whole day with Optimise day
How to share a day's jobs across your vehicles and drivers, read the plan, change it and apply it to the driver app.
1. What it does
Optimise day shares the day's jobs across your vehicles and drivers, puts each route in order and adds tip runs when a vehicle fills up. It suggests a plan. Nothing changes until you apply it. It is on the Carrier plan and up, and owners, admins and office staff who can create and assign jobs can use it.
2. Before you start
Each depot needs a postcode (Settings, Depots), because routes start and end there. Each vehicle should have a payload in kg and a depot, and drivers should have a depot too. Your tip and receiving sites need a postcode. Add opening hours such as "Mon-Fri 7:00-16:30, Sat 7:00-12:00" and the plan will not send a vehicle to a closed site. Jobs need a postcode and a weight, and a job with no weight is planned as weightless.
3. Booked times
A latest arrival time on a job sets a window from its booked time to that time. Without one, a booked time is read as a window from 30 minutes before to 90 minutes after. Windows are soft: the plan keeps to them where it can and lists the jobs that run late. It does not promise a window.
4. Plan the day
Open Schedule, choose Routes and pick the date, then choose Optimise day. Choose the jobs to plan (all open jobs, or only unassigned ones), the depots, the time vehicles leave and the most hours a driver can drive and be on duty. The defaults are 9 hours of driving and 10 hours on duty. Choose Plan the day. A large day takes up to 45 seconds.
5. Read the plan
The label at the top says whether the plan used road distances or estimates. "Road distances for 92% of legs" means 92% of the legs in the routes are road distances and the rest are estimates. The tiles show vehicles used, miles, driving time, tip trips and late jobs. "Against what is dispatched today" scores the day as it stands, and the same drivers run through the single-driver planner, on the same distances. If some jobs have no driver yet, the two do not cover the same jobs and the panel says so. Jobs the plan could not place are listed with the reason, for example that the load is heavier than any vehicle, or that every vehicle is out of driving hours. Open a driver to see their stops, arrival times and tip runs, and to see them on the map.
6. Change it
Lock a job to keep it with its driver and vehicle. Remove vehicle takes a vehicle out of the plan. Choose Re-run to plan again with your changes. Apply plan is switched off until you do.
7. Apply it
Choose Apply plan and confirm. The jobs get their driver, vehicle, stop order and planned arrival, and each driver's app shows the new order. Completed jobs are left alone. Locked jobs stay locked next time.
8. Road distances and estimates
The plan starts from estimated distances. It then fetches road distances from OpenRouteService, using a lorry profile, for the stops that share a route. This only happens while the daily allowance with the routing provider is available, and without a routing key set up the plan uses estimates only. Road distances are saved, so planning the same area again is quicker. When the allowance runs out, the remaining legs stay as estimates and the label says so.
9. What it does not do
It does not use live traffic, so arrival times are planned from the distances above and not from the roads on the day. It limits driving and time on duty but does not plan driver breaks, so add those yourself. Planning twice with the same jobs and the same saved distances gives the same plan. On a phone you can read a plan but not run or apply one.