Default Values

Learn about the default values in Visitplanning action template.

Visit planning is not functional out-of-the-box. The following minimum customizations must be in place for the feature to work.

Manual visit planning:

  • A valid Bing license key must be specified in the License key configuration parameter (Geo Coordinates category) in the Configuration info area (MC), see Configuration Info Area in the CRM.Core Administrator Guide.
  • Location data (i.e. geographic coordinates) for your reps and customers must be available. They should be entered in the respective Latitude and Longitude fields. For further details, see Location. For further details, see Geo-Coordinates in the CRM.Core Administrator Guide.

Generation of suggestions:

  • You need to define queries for visit candidates and planned visits that need to be referenced via Z5 variables. For further details, see Variables and Queries.
  • The info areas to be searched and the default time frame for creating suggestions are defined in the action. For further details, see VisitPlanning Action Parameters.

Rep

The (Select Rep) button in the page header allows selecting another rep.

The selected rep's name is displayed in the header and in the info text in the New Suggestions dialog.

Note: Since important parts of the Visit Planning configuration depend on Z5 variables, you need to take into account that variables are always evaluated for the currently logged-in rep. E.g. if a variable value depends on the rep's country, a rep from one country cannot correct planning for reps from another country.

Default: currently logged-in rep

Location

For customer records (companies and persons) to be considered by the Visit Planning, their location must be present in the database, entered in the respective Latitude and Longitude fields.

The rep's starting point is specified in the New Suggestions dialog (Start from and Start next day from drop-down lists). Available values:

  • "Home" : The starting point is read from the Latitude and Longitude fields in the selected rep's ID record.
  • "Office": The coordinates of the selected rep's linked FI record are used.
  • Last Visit: The coordinates of the location of the last MA record (last 3 days, maximum) are used. The location to be used is determined in the following order: FI > KP > PE.

When optimizing the route using the Optimize button, the first visit (MA or SV) of the day is always used as starting point.

Default: Home

Working Hours / Contact Times

Rep

Suggestions are created within the rep's working hours as defined in the rep's Rep (ID) record by checking Individual work hours (ID:105) and entering the working hours in the fields ID:29 to ID:56. If no individual working hours are defined for a rep, the settings defined in the Calendar.DayStartsAt / Calendar.DayEndsAt Web Configuration parameters are used as a fallback. For further details, see Calendar Parameters.

Customer

Contact times (CT) defined for companies and persons are taken into account. If no contact times have been specified for a company or person, Aurea CRM assumes the customer is available any time during the rep's working hours. No annotation is created in that case.

As for reps the Calendar.DayStartsAt / Calendar.DayEndsAt Web Configuration parameters are used as a fallback.

In addition to working hours/contact times, public holidays as specified in Calendar.HolidayCalendarID) and company holidays as defined in CT:27/28 are taken into account.

Default working hour: 8 AM to 6 PM

Default contact time: during working hour.

Variables and Queries

Suggestions for the selected rep and time frame are calculated based on the following:

  • a query determining already planned activities that are part of the route,
  • a query determining the "candidates" for visits based on values like ABC, target vs. actual visits etc.
  • additional parameters like default visit length, weighting, break time between visits.

These settings are referenced via Z5 variables. For further details, see Variables.

The variables referencing the two queries must be defined:

  • VisitPlanning.Query.Candidates
  • VisitPlanning.Query.Planned

For the optional variables appropriate defaults are in place if undefined.