Assign and optimize jobs in bulk with Advanced Route Optimization

Overview

Advanced Route Optimization assigns and schedules your work onto routes in bulk. Select the jobs, recurring service events (RSEs), and service agreement visits (SAVs) you need to place, pick the routes to fill, and Advanced Route Optimization assigns them and sequences each route for you. The results land in a preview you can review and adjust before anything reaches your live routes.

This replaces assigning appointments a route at a time. You can place a week of work in one pass, and because you set the goal and see the result before applying it, you stay in control of the schedule.

Things to know

• Advanced Route Optimization is not the same as Optimize Technician Route on the Dispatch Board. They are separate tools with different limits, and Advanced Route Optimization only works in Routing.

• You can only optimize up to 1000 jobs, RSEs, or SAVs in a single optimization run.

• Optimization accounts for time and distance. It does not account for what is on a truck, how much a truck can hold, or if a truck has mechanical problems.

• Your goal, restriction, and preference selections save at the account level. When one person changes them, the new selections become the default for everyone.

• Validate service location addresses before you optimize. Unvalidated addresses produce inaccurate drive times and can stop optimization from running.

• Set start and end locations for your technicians. This can be found in the Routing section of Settings > People > Technicians > Technician Profile. A route without a start and end location cannot be optimized.

• Nothing changes on your live routes until you click Apply. You can review, adjust, or discard a preview without affecting the schedule.

• A preview is available for five days and then expires. After it expires, you cannot apply it and need to run a new optimization.

Best practices

• Use Advanced Route Optimization as a planning tool. Most teams optimize a week or two ahead rather than the same morning.

• Start with a small scope. Optimize two or three routes first to see how the results look before you plan a full day.

• Pick the one goal that matches your priority for those routes. You can only select one goal per optimization.

• Add restrictions only where your business genuinely needs them. Every restriction narrows the options available to the optimizer.

• Check the count of appointments that could not be optimized before you apply. This tells you what still needs manual attention.

• Review the preview against your own knowledge of the area. The preview exists so you can correct anything the optimizer got wrong.

Use cases

• A pest control dispatcher plans next week's routes across 20 technicians in one pass, instead of sequencing each route individually.

• A lawn care operations lead selects Balanced number of appointments so every crew finishes with a similar stop count.

• A pool service dispatcher in a dense metro area selects Minimize driving distance to cut fuel spend across the fleet.

• A dispatcher whose trucks carry treatment chemicals turns on hazmat road restrictions so routes avoid roads that prohibit those materials.

• During peak season, a manager selects Maximize revenue to prioritize the highest-value stops across available capacity.

Open Advanced Optimization

1. Go to the navigation bar and click Dispatch > Routing. The Route Management map opens.

2. In the toolbar, click Advanced Optimization. 

The optimization setup opens. You complete three steps in order, Goals, Select jobs, and Select routes, and then run the optimization.

Tip: You can move back and forward between the three setup steps as often as you like. Nothing is committed until you click Run optimization.

Choose your optimization goal

The goal tells the optimizer what to prioritize when it builds your routes.

1. In the Optimization Settings window, click the Goals tab. 

2. Select one of the following goals:        

   • Minimize drive time: Minimizes total drive time.

   • Maximize revenue: Optimizes routes for highest production value.

   • Balanced number of appointments: Distributes the workload evenly across routes.

   • Minimize driving distance: Minimizes total distance driven.

   Note: You can only select one goal per optimization. Drive time and driving distance can produce different routes, so choose the one that matters more to your business.

Set restrictions and preferences

Restrictions tell the optimizer how to treat specific road features. Preferences control additional optimization behavior.

1. In the Optimization Settings window, click the Restrictions tab. 

2. For each road feature, select how you want the optimizer to treat it:        

   • Allow: Use the road feature normally. This is the default.

   • Avoid: Use the road feature only when there is no reasonable alternative.

   • Exclude: Do not use the road feature.

3. Set any of the following restrictions:        

   • Tolls

   • Ferries

   • Highways

   • U-turns

   • Left-hand turns

   • Service roads

   • Sharp turns

4. Click the Preferences tab to set additional options. For more information, see Optimize your routes.

Select the appointments to include

1. Click Select jobs and use the toolbar to select the jobs/visits you want to optimize. 

2. (Optional) Use the Job Filter tab to narrow the appointments shown on the map. You can filter by date range, zone, business unit, job type, skills, priority, and the other standard job filters.

3. Adjust your selection. Select All is chosen by default.        

   • Click Unselect all to clear the selection and start over.

   • Use the Selector tool to click individual appointments and remove them.

   • Use the Lasso tool to draw a shape around a group of appointments and add them back.

The toolbar shows a running count of the jobs and visits you have selected.

Tip: You can select jobs, recurring service events (RSEs), and scheduled appointment visits (SAVs). Click a pin with the pan tool active to see the appointment details before deciding whether to include it.

Select the routes to optimize

1. Click Select routes. The panel switches to the Route tab and shows your route list. All routes are selected by default. 

2. (Optional) Use the Route Filters to narrow the routes shown. You can filter by date range, business unit, teams, and technicians.

3. Adjust your selection:        

   • Clear the checkbox next to any route you want to leave out.

   • Click Unselect all to clear the selection, then select only the routes you want.

   • Click Select all to reselect every route.

The toolbar shows how many routes you have selected.

Run the optimization

1. When your goal, appointments, and routes are set, click Run optimization.

2. Watch the progress on your route cards. The selected routes are tagged while the optimization runs and the map pins change to show that the appointments are part of an active optimization. 

   Note: Routes stay interactive while an optimization runs. They are not locked.

3. Wait for the optimization to finish. Large optimizations across many routes and appointments take longer than small ones. In the rare instance that an optimization fails to run, it automatically times out after 240 minutes.

4. When the route cards show that the preview is ready, continue to the next step.

Review the results in the preview

The preview is a sandbox. It shows you the plan the optimizer built without changing anything on your live routes.

1. Click the Advanced Optimization Queue.  

   Tip: If you’re running multiple optimizations at the same time, click Expand to review the details of each run (goals, constraints, routes, etc.) so you can keep track of which one is which.

2. Open the completed optimization to enter the preview. A Preview banner appears at the top of the screen with the date and time of the optimization run. The left panel filters to the routes you selected, and the map and calendar show only the preview. 

3. Review the route cards for each technician. Each card shows the stop count, drive distance, drive time, and total time for the proposed route.

4. Check the toolbar for the count of appointments that could not be optimized. These appointments were not placed on a route. Common reasons include an appointment that cannot fit inside its arrival window or a service location whose address has not been validated.

5. If you want the optimization to take effect in your live routing, click Apply in the toolbar.

Adjust the plan in the preview and apply your changes

You can change the optimizer's plan by hand before you apply it.

1. Activate the Selector or Lasso from the toolbar.

2. Select the appointments you want to move.

3. Click Select route(s) and choose the route you want to move them to.

4. Click Assign in the selection panel. The appointments move to the route you selected. 

5. To adjust timing, open a route and drag an appointment to a new time slot, or drag the edge of an appointment to change its duration.

   Tip: Repeat these adjustments as many times as you need. Your changes stay in the preview until you apply the plan.

6. When finished, click Apply in the toolbar.

   Tip: You can assign, reassign, unassign jobs/RSEs/SAVs, hit Apply, and then go back to those same routes and run a bulk optimization in live routing. This prevents you from having to manually drag appointments into the calendar in preview.

Review past optimizations

The Advanced Optimize Queue keeps a record of your optimization runs.

1. Click the Advanced Optimization Queue.

2. Click a tab to choose what you want to see:        

   • Preview: Optimizations that have finished but have not been applied.

   • Applied: Optimizations you have already applied to your routes. 

3. Review each row. Rows show the date and time of the run, the number of routes and appointments included, and the number of appointments that were skipped.

4. Expand   a row to see the goal, restrictions, and preferences that were used for that run.

5. Use the row actions to manage a run:        

   • Preview:                

     • Stop an optimization that is still in progress.

     • Rerun an optimization that failed.

     • Delete a completed or failed optimization.

   • Applied:                

     • Delete a completed or failed optimization. 

Want to learn more?

• See Manage and assign routes in Routing

• See Optimize your routes