The Territories functionality in MaxOptra allows you to limit the freedom of MaxOptra auto-planning by providing access to certain geographical areas only for certain drivers or vehicles. This may be useful if you want to utilize driver's local knowledge or implement fixed routes.

To manage your territories, make sure the selected role is Account Administrator and you are on the Territories page of the Settings tab:

Let us say we want to limit what drivers can go into the London congestion zone. Click Add to start drawing a territory on the map.

Click anywhere to add new points and continue to draw a polygon area:

Click Cancel if you want to stop drawing or click the red point to finish the area:

Fill in the name for this territory and select a color for it. Click Save.

Now that the territory is set up, it will be assigned to all orders located within that polygon. Remember, the territories are only applied when the order is first created. This territory will not be automatically applied for the existing orders. To do that, click the Apply to order button on the Territories screen:

Now, we need to select which drivers can enter this territory. You can do this on the Drivers screen. Click the driver you want (Andy White in our case) and select the territory from the Territories drop-down:

You can also choose to limit vehicles instead of drivers. You can do that by simply selecting the territory on the Vehicles screen:

The logic MaxOptra applies is the following: a vehicle can deliver or collect the order if either the vehicle or the driver driving it or both are allowed in that territory.

First of all, we applied the territories to drivers. In the examples below, all drivers are allowed to enter territories A and B, but only one of them can deliver orders to Central London.

Now, let us see how it works. Go to the Planning screen and upload some orders. Open the Settings window, select the Scheduling tab and in the Territories planning mod field disable the territories for now. Then plan the routes:

Notice that two drivers are making deliveries inside the Central London territory:

Now, let us switch the territories on and reschedule the routes:

Pay attention that Oscar Morris (green route line) is now the only one making deliveries within the Central London territory we have set up: