Sales Rep Scheduling

Multi-day scheduling and route planning

Schedules are planned based on customer visit frequency, priority and location. The scheduling algorithm will do its best to to schedule high priority customer visits first, and then add subsequent visits on the same day if they are nearby.

If a visit cannot be done on a specific day, it is moved to a different day using the following business logic:

1. The number of visits in a day does not exceed the maxStopsPerDay parameter (by default, this is set to 15).

2. The day selected is not a public holiday or a leave day.

A vehicle routing algorithm is then used to link each visit together on the same route in such a way as to minimize the total distance travelled. To access the schedule for an individual sales rep, you need to click on his name on the sales rep listing page (http://52.237.241.57/schedules), where you can search for individual sales reps based on name, email or schedule start and end dates.

There are two ways to view a sales rep's schedule - calendar view or map view.

Calendar View

The calendar view shows the weekly schedule for a sales rep, with each column representing a calendar day. Colored blocks represent customer visits and the gaps between the blocks represent the travel time required to get to the next visit. There is always a break of one hour between 12 pm and 1 pm for lunch.

Users can browse the weekly schedule by using the calendar navigation tool on the top right or clicking the back and forward arrows on the sides of the calendar. Clicking on a visit brings up an option to either view the visit on the map view or delete it (admin / sales manager only). Deleting a visit only removes that store's visit from the day's schedule. Visits on other days to the same store are not affected. Clicking on the date at the top of each column brings you to the map view for that day.

Sales managers and admins can drag + drop a visit from one column to another to move it to a different day. This "force assigns" the visit to the new day. Once the day is reoptimized by pressing the "reoptimize your visits" button, the change is confirmed. Any visits that cannot be accommodated due to the new visit are shown at the bottom in grey.

Map View

The map view allows you to see the sales rep's route on a map, across multiple day. The side bar allows you to toggle specific days on or off, and when expanded, shows an ordered list of all the stops on each day.

A gantt chart on the bottom supplies a timeline view of the route for each day. Clicking on a visit on the gantt chart or sidebar will open an info window on the marker that corresponds to the visit. The color of the marker indicates whether the visit is high opportunity (green) or medium/low opportunity (orange) while the color of the polyline linking the visits tells you the date of the visit.