Minimum Version Required: 24.09
Pre-Conditions
Requires the Strategic Routing App to be installed.
Steps
Exporting Data to Wise Systems Strategic Planner
1. Navigate to the Route Versions table
The Route Versions table is the entry point of the Strategic Planner integration.
2. Click on the table action icon/3 dots next to the inactive Route Version
3. Select the Strategic Planner menu option
4. Click "Add a planning session"
5. Give the Planning Session a descriptive name and click the "Create" button.
After a few seconds, the planning session will be updated with a unique session ID and will be set to the New status.
6. Select the planning session and click the "Next Fleet" button to begin the process to determine what routes and activities will be included in the route planning session.
7. Select the Activity
The fleet includes what routes and vehicles you want to include in the planning session. The activity selected will filter on those routes. For example, selecting presell activities will filter on presell routes. It is not recommended to combine presell and delivery in the same planning session.
8. Add any additional filters and click the "Search" button to load the fleet data
9. Exclude vehicles from the plan
You may not want certain vehicles or routes to be included in the route planning session. After the data is returned, check the Exclude checkbox to prevent that vehicle and route from being included.
10. Once you have the desired vehicles and routes included, click the "Next Customers" button to begin setting up the customer data
11. Load customers by selecting a sales history date range and applying any other desired filters
12. Then, click the "Search" button to load the matching customers
13. The customer data will include sales cycle averages, which are calculated using the average weekly sales for the date range selected. The average is then multiplied by the frequency of the customer's visits in a 4-week cycle.
For example, if a weekly visited customer had an average sales of 100 cases per week, the sales cycle average would be 400 cases.
14. Leaving a customer assigned to a route will leave that customer on their current route in the planning session. To unassign a customer from a route, click "Unassign Route". This will tell the strategic planner that this customer can be assigned to any route.
If you have filtered on customers that are currently on a route that is not included in the fleet file, they will automatically be unassigned. For example, if you did not include route 100 in the fleet data, but are including customers that are currently on route 100, they would have to be unassigned from the route.
15. A service pattern includes the day of the week and phase. Unassigning a customer from a service pattern will allow that customer to be routed to other days and different phases.
The current frequency of a customer will not change, for example, if a service pattern for a customer is currently phase one only, that customer could be moved to phase 2, 3, or 4.
16. It is possible to unassign a customer from a vehicle type as well by checking "Unassign Vehicle Types".
If the vehicle type is not unassigned, that customer will only be put on a route with the same vehicle type that is included in the fleet file.
17. To send your fleet and customer data, click "Send to Strategic Planner".
18. Then, click "Login to Strategic Planner". This will open the Wise Systems Strategic Planning tool in a new tab in your browser.
Best Practices
Before sending data to Wise:
Review the data on the Service Windows table. Having accurate start and end times, and days of the week data will greatly improve route optimization results.
Have 1 vehicle and 1 user on 1 route. For example if you are including route 101 in your route plan, in Encompass, this typically is 5 route records (101 Mon, 101 Tue, 101 Wed, 101 Thu, 101 Fri). These 5 records should have the same vehicle and same user. Having mixed vehicles or users on the same route number will cause duplication in Wise.
By design, Encompass only allows inactive route version to be exported or imported from/to Encompass. Copying the active version as the baseline is the best practice.
Do not export delivery, presell, merchandising, etc; on the same route planning session. Wise doesn't handle this well. For presell and delivery, we have the functionality in place to keep delivery and presell stops aligned when importing back into Encompass.