Priorities tell OptimoRoute how important or urgent an order is when planning routes. In this article, you’ll learn how priorities affect planning and how to set them on orders.
| Who can use this feature | |
| All plans | |
| All users | |
| All regions | |
What are priorities?
Priorities are a soft planning constraint that tells OptimoRoute how important and urgent an order is. They can affect whether an order is scheduled and how early it appears in a route.
There are 4 priorities:
- Critical: Considered the most important and the most urgent. The system will attempt to schedule these as early as possible placing the order at the beginning of the route to be done first.
- High: Considered very important and very urgent. The system will attempt to schedule these as early as possible following any Critical orders.
- Medium: The default priority on all orders. Considered not urgent, but important. The system will distribute these along the route generally attempting to place them after any High priority orders.
- Low: Considered not urgent and not important. If not all orders can fit in a route, typically Low priority orders will be left out.
Priorities influence route planning, but they do not guarantee that an order will be scheduled or placed at a specific time or place on the route. Other routing constraints, such as time windows, driver availability, and skills, still apply.
| Be conservative when assigning “Critical” and “High” priorities. Using too many can reduce route efficiency. |
Setting priorities on an order
You can add a priority to an order in three ways:
- Edit the order in OptimoRoute
- Include the priority when importing orders
- Set the priority through the API
Editing order priority
By default, all orders will be set to have a “Medium” priority if no other is set.
To change the order priority:
- Go to "Plan & Optimize"
- Select the order or orders you want to change the priority for
- Click "Edit order"
- In the "Priority" input, choose the priority you want for these orders
- Click “Save”
Importing order priorities
To import priorities on orders:
- Add a priority column to your spreadsheet
- Enter one valid priority code for each order
- Go to "Plan & Optimize"
- Click "Import Orders"
- Drop in your spreadsheet
- Map that column to the "Priority" field in OptimoRoute
- Continue through the import process
Priority codes or priority name are both supported for import
- C = Critical
- H = High
- M = Medium
- L = Low
Results
After you set priorities and plan your routes, OptimoRoute uses those priorities when deciding which orders to schedule and when to place them in the route.
For example, imagine you have four orders:
| Order | Priority | Expected result |
|---|---|---|
| Order A | “Critical” | Strongly favored for scheduling and likely to appear first or earlier in the route |
| Order B | “High” | Favored for scheduling and generally placed after critical-priority work |
| Order C | “Medium” | Planned with the default priority |
| Order D | “Low” | More likely to be left unscheduled if all orders cannot fit |
If all four orders can be scheduled, “Critical” and “High” priority orders will generally appear earlier than “Medium” and “Low” priority orders.
If there is not enough time or capacity to schedule every order, OptimoRoute is more likely to leave lower-priority orders unscheduled. Priorities do not create a fixed stop order. Time windows, capacity, driver skills, travel time, and other planning constraints can change the final route.
Using too many "Critical" and "High" priorities can create strange or inefficient routing results.