Plan routes over multiple weeks

Weekly planning is ideal when you have a flexible time frame for completing orders. For example, you can use it to create optimized and efficient routes for orders that need to happen within a certain week or month. In this article, we will explain how to use this feature. 

Who can use this feature
	Pro and Custom  plans
	All users
	All regions

What is weekly planning?

Weekly planning is an advanced feature of OptimoRoute that allows you to plan up to 5 weeks at a time, and still accommodate multiple scheduling constraints.

This feature is available upon request for all Pro plans and higher. Contact customer support to activate weekly planning or to upgrade your account.

Planning routes with weekly planning

Once you have weekly planning enabled for your account, you can plan up to 5 weeks at a time. 

To plan routes: 

1. Go to the "Plan and Optimize" tab
2. Choose a date that will define the start week
3. Select the period you want to plan across
4. Add orders if you haven't already
5. Click "Plan Routes"

Your orders will now be planned onto routes across the selected time period. 

Choosing a date

When choosing the date, for example March 26th displayed in the calendar below, the week selected will be the week that includes that date. 

Since we are in the ‘Week’ planning range, we are actually planning for and looking at the one-week period beginning on Monday, March 25th and ending on Sunday, March 31st:

Tip: You can adjust which day of the week is your start date in your account settings.

Adjusting the map view

Once you have planned your routes, you can view them, you still have the flexibility of viewing routes and orders per day:

or per week/s:

To change the view: 

1. Go the day/week dropdown next to the date picker
2. Choose the display you want to work with

When looking at a multi-week plan, every driver has their own color and the letter on the pin indicates the day of the week. The information shown on the "Orders" tab and "Routes" tab corresponds to the period selected in the dropdown menu.

Adding weekly constraints

Weekly planning has additional constraints that is not available during normal planning. You can add these order and driver constraints to your schedules. The routes and schedules that OptimoRoute plans will take all of these into account.

These constraints include: 

• Allowing an order to be scheduled only on certain days
• Restricting the scheduling date for an order
• Blackout dates to restrict scheduling days
• Advanced driver constraints like scheduling driver availability for certain days

Allow order only on certain days

This constraint tells the system that an order can only be serviced on certain days of the week, for example "Saturdays and Sundays". There are two ways to add this constraint: 

• Editing an individual order by going to the "Basic info" section of the order window
• Adding the information on import using the "Allowed Days" column and inputting the allowed day or days of the week (e.g. M, T, Th or Mon, Tue, Thu)

Restrict scheduling date

This constraint tells the system that an order can only be serviced on a specific day or date range, for example "May 14-May 18". 

There are two ways to add this constraint: 

• Editing an individual order by going to the "Basic info" section of the order window
• Adding the information on import using the following columns:
  • "Earliest date"
  • "Latest date"
  • "Only on date"  

Blackout dates

This constraint tells the system that an order cannot be serviced on a particular date or date range.

There are two ways to add this constraint: 

• Editing an individual order by going to the "Basic info" section of the order window
• Adding the information on import using the "Blackout dates" columns

Blackout dates are used to mark days when your customers aren’t available for deliveries, inspections, maintenance work, etc. If drivers are unable to visit customers on certain days or during a particular set of dates (i.e. holidays or days when customers are particularly busy), then those days can be restricted or “blacked out”. The objective is to help you stay both flexible and organized by knowing ahead of time when your drivers can be off duty.

If you’re planning weekly schedules and there are unworkable dates, you can add a “Blackout Date” column in your spreadsheet, then import and column map it as you normally would. Likewise, if there are several dates that need to be removed from your itinerary, you can apply the same process for regular blackout dates, only in this case you would add “Ranges” to the column name and insert the date ranges accordingly.

Examples of date formats that are supported during import are:

• 03/26/2024,
• 03/26/2024-03/27/2024,
• 03/26/2024, 03/27/2024-03/28/2024,
• 03/26/2024-03/31/2024, 04/08/2024-04/12/2024,
• 2024-03-26 – 2024-03-29,
• 2024-03-26-2024-03-31, 2024-04-26-2024-04-30
  
  

Advanced planning settings and driver constraints

Weekly planning will allow you to see an "Advanced view" when planning routes. When you click Plan Routes, the Planning Settings window will appear. The "Basic view" tab lets you adjust constraints one date at a time.

The "Advanced view" tab to easily adjust multiple driver constraints within the entire planning time frame. Here you’ll see a grid where Drivers are listed vertically to the left, and the dates within your planning time frame are shown along the top:

Define the driver/s and date/s that will have constraints applied:

• To select driver/date cells individually: click on them directly. They will turn gray when selected, click on the cell again to deselect it.
• To select all of the dates for a driver: click on the checkbox next to the driver’s name. Click on the checkbox again to deselect it.
• To select all of the drivers for a date: click on the checkbox above the date. Click on the checkbox again to deselect it.

• To set start and finish time: make the adjustment where you see Work time.

• To set vehicles: make the adjustment where you see Vehicle.

• To set driver availability status:

  • Disable indicates that drivers are unavailable for the selected dates.
  • Enable indicates that drivers are available for the selected dates.
  • Lock indicates that the planned routes for that driver and date cannot be changed.
  • Reset will remove the above constraints for the drivers and dates selected, and restore the default settings.

Example:

Below you will see an example of an advanced view with multiple driver constraints applied.