Many companies face the challenge of allocating the most efficient delivery date for their orders. MaxOptra provides a powerful tool enabling its users to produce optimised plans in one click. With Multi-day Optimisation functionality users can let MaxOptra allocate the most efficient date of delivery within 5-day horizon automatically.

This option is available depending on your tariff. If you are on a tariff, where multi-day optimisationis not supported, please contact the MaxOptra Support Team.

How Multi-day Optimisation Works

Suppose, you have some orders that you want to plan for the coming 5 days. You need to build a flexible schedule, where each order finds the most cost-efficient place. To do that you first need to set up the multi-day time windows in the order.

Set Up Order Time Windows

Manually

Set up the orders operation windows for 5 days ahead. You can do it manually on the Order form:

CSV File Import

If you import your orders from the csv-file, use the orderDateFrom and orderDateTo fields to set the date range, and the orderTimeFrom1 and orderTimeTo1 fields to set the operation hours for these dates (for details, see Order Import File. Column Names and Requirements ).

API Request

If you import your orders via API, it is possible to set several time windows using the save method (start and end fields of the dropWindow section).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<dropWindows>
                 
    <dropWindow>
                        
        <start>16/01/2020 8:00</start>
                        
        <end>16/01/2020 12:00</end>
                     
    </dropWindow>
                 
    <dropWindow>
                        
        <start>16/01/2020 14:00</start>
                        
        <end>16/01/2020 18:00</end>
                     
    </dropWindow>
                 
    <dropWindow>
                        
        <start>17/01/2020 8:00</start>
                        
        <end>17/01/2020 12:00</end>
                     
    </dropWindow>
                 
    <dropWindow>
                        
        <start>17/01/2020 14:00</start>
                        
        <end>17/01/2020 18:00</end>
                     
    </dropWindow>
              
</dropWindows>

Note To launch multi-day scheduling via API, use the start method (add the days parameter to your request - a number between 1 and 5).

The multi-day orders on the **Unplanned ** order list will show the date/time windows you have set:

Select Optimisation Option

On the Planning screen click the Optimise button dropdown to select the planning options:

Type the number of days in the Run planning for __ days field. Note that the range is limited to 2-5-day period. Multi-day optimization can be run for one or for all distribution centres.

Run Scheduling

Your routes will be optimised and you will be able to schedule delivers at the most cost efficient date. This is how the multi-day plan looks like after optimisation throughout the 4-day period:

To unallocate the multi-day schedules, you will have to do it for each day of planning. Once unallocated, the multi-day orders are displayed in the Unplanned order list throughout the multi-day period, so that you can plan them for another day of the specified period, if you want to.

Note

Multi-day optimisation is scheduled, starting from the current date.
Using Scheduling Multi-day Shifts (Availability hours) with multi-day optimiszation is currently not supported. If you try to start multi-day optimisation with drivers on multi-day shifts, the error message is displayed:

Different Settings on Different Days

MaxOptra allows to make settings different from the default ones for different planning days by using the

button on the Planning screen (see Settings window ). As these on the spot changes can influence the planning process, let us review the way they are going to be considered for multi-day optimisation in more detail.

**Scheduling ** tab. Only the first day settings are taken into consideration for multi-day planning. Any changes you make to these settings for the following days of your multi-day period will not be considered.
Operation duration tab. The following settings are taken into consideration for each day of multi-day period: **Fixed loading duration ** and Fixed unloading duration. The rest of Operation duration settings are considered only for the first day of planning.
OBTL tab. Only the first day settings are taken into consideration for multi-day optimization. Any changes you make to these settings for the following days of your multi-day period will not be considered.