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Routing overview

Learn how to use Mapsly routing tools to increase efficiency of your sales and service teams

Sergey Shurygin avatar
Written by Sergey Shurygin
Updated over a week ago

For a general description of Mapsly's routing capabilities, please take a look at the Routing overview page on our website.

Use Mapsly’s web and mobile apps to build optimal routes via multiple locations, with live and historical traffic data taken into account.

Capabilities

With the Mapsly Routing feature, you can:

  • plan large routes: up to 500 waypoints (or more, for an additional fee), optimized or non-optimized, on Pro and Enterprise plans, and 100 non-optimized / 25 optimized on Essential;

  • plan routes for multiple users and/or multiple days at once, with the locations being distributed in the most efficient way between participating users based on their working schedule and preferred start/end locations (similar to how it’s implemented in the regular visit planning but without creating multiple visits);

  • account for various job constraints controlled by your CRM, like job type (service, pickup, delivery, or pickup-delivery), priority, availability windows, required truck capacity, required “skills”, stop duration, allowed and disallowed drivers, and more;

  • account for vehicle parameters entered for each Mapsly user or controlled from the CRM, like truck capacity (one or multiple dimensions), “skills” (significant properties that a truck or driver possesses that may be required by a job), start/end locations, lunch break, working schedule, max activities per shift, and many more.

NOTE: You'll need the Pro or Enterprise plan to plan routes for multiple users and/or multiple days at once, or to use job/vehicle parameters.

Routing terminology: jobs and activities

You can plan a route for 4 types of jobs: service (which is the default type), pickup, delivery, and pickup-delivery. All input jobs are planned as activities in the resulting routes.

Route job types

A service, pickup, and delivery job produces one activity in the resulting route, while a pickup-delivery job produces two activities: one for the pickup, and one for the delivery — so we use two different terms to refer to input jobs and resulting activities.

A job may be represented by a record of any object with a defined location fields, or as a manually added location on a map. A job represented by a record may be any of the 4 types, while a manually added location is assumed to be service.

Routing session and route statuses

With Mapsly Routing you can plan optimal routes for multiple users and/or days at once. The planning is executed within a routing session which takes a list of jobs and a list of users as an input and produces one or multiple routes as a result.

A routing session is a system object, so you may view your Routing session records in the table view.

A routing session starts in the design stage, so you can add/remove jobs and participating Mapsly users. When you click the Build button, your routing session moves to the draft stage, and you'll be able to see the resulting routes that are in the draft status.

From the draft status, you may return to the design stage to add/remove jobs, add/remove users, or change some of the routing session's settings and re-build routes.

Once you're satisfied with the draft routes (while in the draft stage), you may click Save to publish the resulting routes for your users. Published routes will become visible to your users and can be loaded into the Route panel for execution.

Since in Mapsly each route, both in draft and publish state, is represented by a record in the Route system object, Mapsly users with access to the Route object may view all routes in the Table view and perform group actions on them, like their re-assigning to other users and bulk-deletion. Assigning a route to a user is done by updating the route's Owner field.

Route viewer

A Route viewer tool allows you to see one or several routes at a time including those belonging to multiple users and/or multiple days at once.

When in the draft stage of a routing session, the Route viewer will also allow you to see your draft routes, or a combination of the draft and published (live) routes at the same time.

Daily routing credits

To address the highly varying nature of routing workload between Mapsly clients, we introduced daily routing credits that are consumed when your team clicks Build in the Route panel.

For example, when your routing session contains 100 jobs and 5 users, clicking Build will consume 500 routing credits (the number of jobs multiplied by the size of the traveling team).

However, unlike visit planner credits (which are monthly and are not included in your plan by default):

  • routing credits are daily and automatically reset at 00:00 UTC every day;

  • routing credits are allotted per user: a Mapsly account with 100 users is automatically allotted 10 times the number of per-user credits, for example, 50,000 on the Pro plan (500 credits per user per day * 100 users);

  • all Mapsly plans include a package of routing credits that addresses a moderate usage of routing:
    - 200 credits per user per day on the Essential plan,
    - 500 credits per user per day on the Pro plan,
    - 800 credits per user per day on the Enterprise plan.

Additional packages of routing credits are available for an additional fee — to modify your daily routing credit package please contact us in chat or at [email protected].

Accessing routing session and route data in automation

Using the Routing session object you can:

  • access all routing data, both in draft and published statuses, in automation executed by buttons and workflows;

  • create workflows for the Routing session and Route object (for example, triggered when a routing session moves to the draft or published stage, or when a particular route is published);

  • add buttons to the Route panel's menu — to allow users to execute automation for a route, in the draft or published (live) state, or for the entire routing session at once.

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