When planning your orders you have to take into account that they may have various requirements for vehicles carrying goods. Some goods, for example, may require a vehicle equipped with a tail lift or to have side-loading. Some goods need to be transported chilled or frozen and so on.

In order to help you to consider all aspects and make your scheduling easier, MaxOptra provides the Vehicle requirements feature. You set the vehicle requirements to your vehicles and orders, and MaxOptra will match all the orders to the appropriate vehicles.

To create a vehicle requirement, select Settings>Vehicle requirements:

Click the Add button:

Fill in the requirement's name and the short reference (abbreviation), which you will see on the planning screen -in the order marker on the map, in the order tooltip and in the order form in the list of Unplanned Orders. Make sure the abbreviation is unique. Select the incompatible vehicle requirements from the drop-down, where necessary, and save the changes:

When vehicle requirements are created it is possible to apply them to your fleet vehicles. To apply a vehicle requirement to a vehicle select the Supported vehicle requirement field in the Vehicle form:

If required you can apply the Vehicle requirements to your orders. You set this field in your Order Import File Guide, API methods. Orders or in the order edit form. To set up the vehicle requirements for newly created orders go to Add Order and select the vehicle requirements from the dropdown in the Vehicle Requirements field.

This is how the vehicle requirement abbreviation marker is displayed on the map:

And this is how the vehicle requirement is displayed in the order card and in the tooltip.

When you run auto-planning, MaxOptra will allocate the orders to the vehicles according to the specified vehicle requirements. Orders without any special requirements can be allocated to any vehicle according to the optimal route scheduling.

When scheduling manually you can allocate your orders to any vehicle. If you allocate a vehicle that does not comply with vehicle requirements of an order, MaxOptra will show a violation warning:

An example of vehicle requirements incompatibility is when a vehicle is equipped to transport both frozen and chilled food, but not able to do so at the same time due to different temperature regimes that need to be adjusted for each type of products. To set up incompatible vehicle requirements in your system, open the same-name dropdown against the corresponding vehicle requirement (Chilled) and select one of the available options (Frozen).

After saving, the incompatible requirements will appear in the opposite vehicle requirements.

After that, if we try to allocate orders of incompatible vehicle requirements to the same vehicle, a violation is displayed: Order by type is incompatible with other orders.

Customer locations (delivery points) may have special requirements to vehicles regardless of the order vehicle requirements. If, for example, a customer location does not have a loading dock, it may require a vehicle equipped with a tail lift to unload the goods.

You can set a vehicle requirement field for a customer location in your CSV Customer locations import or in the Customer Location form (select Settings>General settings>Customer locations). To set up the vehicle requirements for newly created customer locations select the vehicle requirements in the corresponding field of the Customer location form:

An abbreviation for the specific customer location vehicle requirement will be indicated in the order marker on the map, and in the order tooltip on the Unplanned Orders section.

When you run auto-planning, MaxOptra will allocate the orders to the vehicles according to the order vehicle requirements and vehicle requirements specified for the customer location.

When scheduling manually you can allocate your orders to any vehicle. If you allocate a vehicle that does not comply with vehicle requirements of an order then MaxOptra will show a violation warning: