Routing a technician's day and site locations

The Route button orders a technician's visits for the least driving, shows the saving, opens the route in Google Maps and can re-time the day. Sites need coordinates, which Look up finds from the address.

Service → Dispatch board (the Route button); Service → Sites; Service → Technicians.

How do I route a technician's day? On the dispatch board in Day view, press Route on the technician's lane. It takes their scheduled and en-route visits for that day and puts them in the order with the least driving. Emergencies stay first, in their booked order.

What it shows. Driving, as booked against Driving, routed, the Saving and the Drive time, a sketch of the stops, and a table of each stop with its drive, the proposed arrive and leave times, and the time it is booked for now. Change Leave at (08:00 by default) to plan from a different start. Distances are straight-line distances allowing for roads, at an average 40 km/h — a good guide to the order, not a traffic forecast.

Open in Google Maps opens the route with real roads and traffic, in order, ready to drive. Google takes nine stops at a time, so a longer day is split.

Apply this order re-times the visits back to back from the start time: drive, then each job for its estimated minutes (an hour if it has none). It does not tell the customers of the new times, and it does not check other bookings, so look over the board afterwards.

Sites without a location are left off the route and listed, so nothing is guessed. On Service → Sites, a site without coordinates has a Look up button that finds them from the street, city, state and postal code (using OpenStreetMap) and saves them. You can also open the site and type the latitude and longitude — in Google Maps, right-click a spot to copy them. A site with coordinates links to its place on the map.

The technician's start point — the depot or their home — is set when you open the technician under Service → Technicians: type the address and press Look up, or type the coordinates, then Save. With a start point the route starts and ends there; without one it starts at the first visit. Changing a technician needs the Service admin or dispatch permission.

See Service orders and the dispatch board for the board itself.