About the Regular visit planner
Regular visit planner (or for short, Planner) is a tool that allows you to plan repeating visits to records of any object in Mapsly, for individuals users or a group of users at once, based on a variety of controlling parameters like visit frequency and duration, agents' working schedules and many more. The Planner uses advanced Vehicle Routing Problem solving algorithms and data about real-time and historic traffic to plan daily routes days and weeks ahead ensuring minimal possible drive time and maximum efficiency of the traveling team. Learn more about the concept and applications of the Planner here.
Planner's components and implementation options
In Mapsly, the Planner is implemented as an Action that store a Planner's controlling parameters and can be executed by any automation element that can execute actions, like a Workflow rule, Button, Schedule or another action like a Form.
When necessary, you may create multiple Planner actions, which will help plan different objects or plan different subsets of records based on different sets of controlling parameters.
If you'd like to use the Planner to plan visits for individual users, the typical way to execute it is to create a Button in the main menu that a user will press to manually execute a Planner.
If you'd like to use the Planner to plan visits for an entire team of Mapsly users, a typical way to execute the Planner is to
either create a Button for your Mapsly administrator to manually execute the Planner,
or set up a Schedule that will automatically execute the Planner with the required regularity, for example every night.
When using a Button to execute the Planner, a typical way to show the planning session's statistics is to show a message with the statistical message that the Planner creates at the end of its execution. When executing the Planner automatically, you may set up a Send email action to send the statistics to your Mapsly administrator's email.
Pricing: monthly visit planner credits
To use the Regular visit planner, you need to subscribe to a monthly package of Visit planner credits. Each time the Planner is executed, it consumes the amount of credits that equals to the number of locations that need to be visited multiplied by the size of the traveling team. Example: When you execute a Planner that plans visits to 100 records for 5 users, you consume 500 routing credits.
The size of the routing credit package you’ll need depends on your forecast usage of the Planner. For example, if you’re planning to run the kind of planning mentioned in the example above every working day, ~20 days a month, you’ll need to purchase 500 * 20 = 10,000 monthly routing credits.
As your usage changes, you may upgrade to a higher or downgrade to a lower package size – to better match your needs.
The routing credit package is automatically replenished on the 1st day of every month.
To subscribe to a monthly package of visit planner credits or modify your current package, please contact us in chat or at [email protected].
Planner's limitations
The Planner has two limits:
the maximum number of records it can plan visits to within one planning session,
and the maximum number of users it can plan for.
The values for these limits depend on your Planner's pricing tier.
Re-planning routes and preserving previously planned visits
The Planner is designed to be subsequently executed to re-plan visits when new records need to be planned, some existing records should no longer be visited or users' working schedules change. When executed, the planner would remove previously planned but not yet visited locations and re-plan visits while taking into account already visited locations and the new input information.
The Planner can be configured to preserve previously planned visits a certain number of days, for example today and tomorrow - to avoid unexpected changes for the team or to ensure execution of visits agreed with the customers.
Step-by-step guide to setting up the Planner
To set up the Planner follow these steps:
Test your new Planner.