This material can be useful while working with MaxOptra

Dispatcher Planning screen

Planning

Q: Why is the vehicle name different in settings compared to planning screen?

A: When you use the ‘save for today’ option on the Planning screen, it creates a snapshot for that specific day. This means any changes made (like updating the vehicle name) will only appear on the Planning screen for that day or for the future date you selected.
The settings page, however, shows the vehicle information as it will appear after midnight on the date the update takes effect. Until then, it will continue to display the previous name.

Q: How to exchange drivers between vehicles?

A: It is mandatory to assign a vehicle to any driver; however, it is not mandatory for the dispatcher to have the same driver driving the same vehicle every day. Thus, it is necessary to exchange drivers between vehicles through the planning screen prior or after assigning the daily jobs.

To exchange drivers between vehicles:

Click the vehicle name to open the vehicle settings. A separate pop-up window will appear.
Select the driver you want to allocate to the vehicle for the required date from the dropdown.
In case the selected driver is assigned to any other vehicle, the confirmation window is displayed asking to Swap drivers or Unallocate driver from that vehicle or Cancel. Select the appropriate action.
Click Save if you want to apply these changes on the current planning date only. Click Save and update default if you want to save these changes to be applied for the future plans as well.

Q: How to change the start time for the whole run?

A: The dispatcher can apply the updates to a run scheduled for today (for example, it can be an additional order assigned to the vehicle already started). Such updates, when applying the auto-resequencing capability, can cause the change of the run start time. To change the run start time:

Right-click the run on the Gantt chart to display the context menu and select Change run start time.
The Run start time editing window is displayed to let you specify the required run start time.

Q: How to execute mass change for all vehicles and drivers?

A: It is possible to do mass changes to all vehicles and drivers settings for today's plans only.

Right-click any vehicle card to open the context menu.
Select Bulk change action.
The Bulk change form is displayed.
Select the item you would like to change and apply to all vehicles or drivers.
Click Save to apply changes to all vehicles and drivers for the current planning date only. Click Save and update defaults to apply changes to vehicles or drivers for the future plans as well.

Q: Is it possible to inverse a run upside down (To let it start from the end and finish at the start)?

A: Yes, it is. For this purpose, on the Gantt chart open the run context menu and select the Reverse sequence button

In the Table view, select a vehicle performing the run you want to inverse. You will see this run on the right side of the Planning screen. Click the Reverse sequence button (

) located on the top of the Run's table.

Q: How to implement multi-day planning?

A: To understand how it works, let us consider the following use case. Perhaps, a driver has some orders for 24/05/2018 (Edinburgh) and 25/05/2018 (London) without coming back to the depot located in Chippenham. So, the vehicle would leave Chippenham and go to Edinburgh to perform some drops on 24/05/2018, stay overnight and then start working from Edinburgh to London on 25/05/2018 before heading back to the depot (Chippenham). How to program it correctly? Apparently, it brings a driver back to the depot and not recognize the vehicle would stay out overnight.

This case can be resolved if you use multiple time windows with tight or strict access time. But this scheduling case may require you to increase the duty time/driving time of a driver up to 48 hours instead of 12 hours or remove totally any time restriction.

For example, we have an order to deliver from Chippenham to Edinburgh. First, we have to set multiple time windows from 08:00am to 06:00pm for this order. And the second order can be set with time windows from 08:00am to 06:00pm next day.

Second, make the following settings for the driver:

Driving time limit <= 48 hours
Run duration limit <= 48 hours
Duty time limit <= 48 hours
Specify the Availability hours of this driver
Start driving exactly from the shift start - Enabled

Now, run auto-planning and you will find these orders automatically allocated to the driver who meets the conditions of overnight.

Q: How can the dispatcher control this, and what is required from the dispatcher to avoid any overlapping plans?

A: The dispatcher has to deactivate this vehicle for the next dates since it is occupied for the next two days. To deactivate a vehicle, right-click the vehicle card on the Planning screen and select the Deactivate vehicle option from the Vehicle actions.

This action will be applied to vehicle for the current selected date only. Therefore, the dispatcher has to deactivate the vehicle for each coming planning date separately.

Q: How to move schedule to a different day

A: For correct import of a schedule, we recommend using the Import of Pre-allocated Orders from CSV-file , which includes the mandatory fields, like allocationDate and vehicleName. In case you scheduled your orders to a wrong day (via csv-file or via API), you should first export this schedule to file, then adapt it to fit the fixed route template, and finally re-import it to the system again.

Moving a schedule to a different day will be easier if you specify the orderReference in your fixed route import template. In this case, if the orders are allocated, they first need to be un-allocated, as the new import will look up the order reference number and update the schedule date to that on the import file.

Q: After logging in, the Planning screen shows a random date in the past. How to make it open on the last date of planning?

A: Usually when you log in to MaxOptra and open the Planning screen, it shows you the last date of planning. But sometimes, due to some browser problems, the Planning screen may open on some irrelevant past date and keep doing it every time you log in.

The date is actually cached in your browser, therefore, whenever you type MaxOptra address in the URL section you get into the cached URL with its date. See the underlined part in the URL example below:

https://example.maxoptra.com/#!/consolidation-tool/?date=1586390400000&aoc=1659&view=gantt

There are several ways you can fix it:

You can remove the rest of the address which comes after the account ID (after "example.maxoptra.com" in the case above) and log in to the account again.
You can create a shortcut at your desktop with the URL https://example.maxoptra.com/ and whenever you want to access the account, you can simply click the desktop shortcut to access the system.
Finally, you can clear the browser cache/cookies for the last month and keep removing the browser cache on a daily basis.

Geocoding

Q: Is it possible to geocode a customer location by longitude and latitude coordinates while creating orders?

A: It is possible to populate orders with the location coordinates data when importing orders from CSV files or through API only. When creating orders manually from UI it is impossible to geocode location or allocate order using the customer location coordinates.

Map

Q: How to show current vehicle locations on the Planning screen map?

A: It will be possible to show actual locations of vehicles on the Planning screen map for the current day only. To show vehicles on the map, click the

button on the map actions menu.

Q: Why is the vehicle's route drawn on the map as a schema (straight lines)?

A: This is just a simplified drawing. The program considers the distance by roads. This mode is the default one. If you want the routes to be displayed drawn along the roads, use the

Geo routing button on the map actions menu.

Order parameters

Q: How to specify one drop duration time for multiple deliveries to different customers allocated in the same location?

A: The recommended order parameter to be used in such cases is Fixed time per order instead of Fixed time per address and instead of importing orders with a specified value in the “dropDuration” column.

Q: Is it possible to customize order form and import more order details?

A: MaxOptra support team can deploy any additional attribute as a field that can be required for your business. Subsequently, it will be possible to import and populate orders to the system with these additional attributes.

Track-&-Trace screen

Q: How to correct or change the delivery location?

A: To correct or change the location position, you have to perform the following steps:

Click the
(Show on map) button located at the top of the run to display the vehicle's route on the map.
Click the location you want to correct or to move to a different position on the map.
Now you are free to drag an order marker on the map to any different position, then click Save on the confirmation window.

Q: How to increase or decrease the location radius?

A: To change the location radius, you have to perform the following steps:

Click the
(Show on map) button located at the top of the run to display the vehicle's route on the map.
Right click the location you attempted to correct or to move it to a different location on the map.
Click Change location position or radius.
Zoom in the map of the order that you want to increase/decrease the radius.
Click the circle edge to resize the order radius.
Click Save as soon as you finish editing.

Q: Is it possible to customize headings that we currently export to CSV files?

A: Yes, it is possible to export all Track&Trace analysis data to a CSV file. Every account is configured by default to export particular information. Please contact MaxOptra support in case you would like to add any more headings to the data to be exported to a CSV file.

CSV Import

Q: How to create an import file?

A: There are two ways of creating an import file - to create a new import file in Excel and create an import file from a template.

To create a new file in Excel, you should complete the following steps:

Create a new Excel file (work only on the first spreadsheet).
When filling in the data sheet, use the column headers from the Orders table. The order of columns does not matter.
Add the order parameters in the columns according to their names.
Save the created file as a CSV file (comma delimited) - (*.csv).

To create an import file from a template, you should complete the following steps:

Open Microsoft Excel.
Click the Data tab and select From Text in the Get External Data block.
Select the Delimited option and correct file encoding in order the text in the window is displayed correctly. Click Next.
Select the separator Other (,) and click Finish.
Add your orders information according to the columns headings.
Save the file as file name.csv file ignoring any possible messages about the loss of file properties.

Note. Be careful when deleting records from the CSV file using Excel. You should delete not the cells values but the whole lines, so that the file does not have any delimiters in these lines. In addition, it is convenient to use the Text to Column button on the Data tab. This function is used in case the system has not the system separator set up, and the CSV file opens incorrectly.

Q: How to remove line breaks from the import file?

A: Here are the three ways to remove the line breaks.

i. Remove all non-printable characters from text.

Insert a new column to use the CLEAN formula to remove all non-printable characters from text.
In the first cell write the formula =CLEAN(Q2) and drag down the formula to apply to all data in column (Q).
Copy the data from Column (R) and paste into column (Q) the data as VALUE.
Delete column (R) and save the file in CSV format.

ii. Remove Carriage Returns manually

Pros the fastest way.

Cons no any additional features :(.

Please find the steps for eliminating line breaks using Find and Replace:

Select all cells where you want to remove or replace carriage returns.
PressCtrl+H to open the Find & Replace dialog box.
In the Find What field enter Ctrl+J. The field looks empty, but you can see a tiny dot there.
In the Replace With field, enter any value to replace carriage returns. Usually, it is a "space" to avoid 2 words join accidentally. If all you need is deleting the line breaks, leave the Replace With field empty.
Press the Replace All button and enjoy the result!

iii. Delete line breaks using Excel formulas

Pros you can use the formula chain / nested formulas for complex cell text processing. For example, it is possible to remove carriage returns and then eliminate excess leading and trailing spaces and those between words.

Or you may need to delete carriage returns to use your text as an argument of another function without changing the original cells. For example, if you want to be able to use the result as an argument of the function =lookup ().

Cons you'll need to create a helper column and follow many extra steps.

Add the helper column to the end of your data. You can name it "1 line".
In the first cell of the helper column (C2), enter the formula to remove / replace line breaks. Here you can see several helpful formulas for different occasions:
- Handle both Windows and UNIX carriage return/line feeds combinations. **=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(13),""),CHAR(10),"")**
- The next formula will help you replace line break with any other symbol (comma+space). In this caselineswillnot join and extra spaces will not appear. **=TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(13),""),CHAR(10),", ")**
- If you want to remove all nonprintable characters from text, including line breaks: **=CLEAN(B2)**
Copy the formula across the other cells in the column.
Optionally, you can replace the original column with the one where the line breaks were removed:
- Select all cells in column C and press Ctrl + C to copy the data to clipboard.
- Now pick the cell B2 and press the Shift + F10 shortcut. Then just press V.
- Remove the helper column.

Q: What is the difference between all kinds of time window columns in CSV import files?

A: There are a lot of different columns in MaxOptra import files, which can specify the date and time of the delivery depending on a particular use case. Let us review them and find out when and how exactly each of the time windows columns must be used.

date
This column represents the planning date, the date when a delivery or collection should be done. If you leave this column blank, the order will be imported for the current day by default.
dropWindowStart - dropWindowEnd
These columns represent the earliest and the latest possible delivery time of an order. They are used for regular one-day planning. These columns are optional. If not specified, the start and end delivery time will be taken from customer location settings by default. When using these columns the date field is also optional. If you fill out the date, order(s) will be imported for the day you specified, but if you skip the date, order(s) will be imported for the current day.
Note When using the dropWindowStart/End columns, you cannot use the orderTimeFrom/To columns (see below), as they are used for multi-day orders. The dropWindowStart/End columns are also used to set up overnight shifts. In this case, you should specify the order start and end time of the same date. For example: date - 11/03/2019, time windows - 21:00 to 4:00.
orderTimeFrom1 - orderTimeForm2 and orderTimeTo1 - orderTimeTo2
This combination of time columns is used to set up multi-drop time windows for one day and for multi-day orders. This may be useful if you need to consider breaks in customer location availability time (lunch breaks, shift change etc.). In MaxOptra import file you can set not more than two time windows per one day: orderTimeFrom1 - orderTimeTo1 for the first time window and orderTimeFrom2 - orderTimeTo2 for the second time window. It is required to specify the date (date or orderDateFrom/To columns) together with these columns.
orderDateFrom - orderDateTo These columns are used to set up the date range for multi-day orders. MaxOptra supports multi-day planning for 2-5-day period. If you plan for just one day, use the date column. The_orderDateFrom/To_columns are used together with orderTimeForm1/2 - orderTimeTo1/2 columns to specify time windows for the selected date range.

For more details on import files, see Order Import File Guide.

REST API

Q: How to export schedules through SOAP?

A: In MaxOptra REST API, there are three methods available to get schedules from the system: getScheduleByAOCOnDate, getScheduleByVehicleOnDate, getScheduleByVehicleRun.

Q: How to export order statuses?

A: You can use getOrderStatuses method to get the same order statuses you see on the Track&Trace screen.

Mobile Application

Q: Why GPS consumes battery power?

A: GPS is expensive because it is a very slow communication channel — you need to communicate with three or four satellites for an extended duration at 50 bits per second. There is no time division as it is in other communication mechanisms, necessitating powering the antenna for the duration of any communication. Besides, while the GPS is on, the system cannot be turned into the sleep mode. Mobile devices, such as Android and iPhone, achieve their battery life largely because they can aggressively and quickly get into and from sleep modes. GPS prevents this.

GPS's battery draining behaviour is most noticeable during the initial acquisition of the satellite's navigation message: the satellite's state, ephemeris, and almanac. Each satellite acquiring takes from 12 to 30 seconds, but if the full almanac is needed, it can take up to 12 minutes. During all these actions, your phone is unable to fall into deep sleep. A-GPS (Assisted GPS) partially solves the issue by sending the navigational message to your mobile device over your cellular data network or even Wi-Fi. As the bandwidth of either of these greatly dwarves the 50bps of the GPS satellites, the time spent powering the GPS antenna or avoiding deep sleep is greatly reduced.

Q: How to postpone a job to perform it later?

A: A driver can pause order delivery and proceed to it later (such situation may happen when the driver arrives to the customer location and does not find it). To postpone an order, the driver can click the Suspend button that becomes available when the driver arrives to the order address and clicks the Arrive button. The order will stay visible in the run to proceed it later.

Q: Can we define more attributes to order details?

A: Yes, you can define more order attributes in the Order form by creating additional fields and sending them to the driver's application on his mobile device within order details. It will be possible as well to include these attributes to the Driver manifest while printing the list of orders for a driver. Please contact [email protected] if you want to introduce any additional fields into the order form.

Q: How can I reset the driver's username and password for Mobile App?

A: To reset or modify the driver's login and password, make sure the selected role is Account Administrator and you are on the User page of the Settings tab:

Find the driver who needs to reset the password and click on that driver name. The below screen will open, where you should fill in the new login, password (two times: in the New password and in the Repeat password fields) and other details. Click Save.

Settings

Q: Can you clarify what "Break type" and "Allowed break shift" options within MaxOptra mean?

A: Break type can be configured in MaxOptra. It can be Fixed or Dynamic. You can set break type in the Settings> Breaks.

"Fixed" break type is the setting specifying a fixed period of time during working day as a break time for each driver while scheduling. As soon as you set the break type as FIXED, the new Break time table will appear in each driver settings that will allow you to specify a fixed break time (start time/end time) for each driver:
"Dynamic" break type is described in details in MaxOptra Documentation. Please Dynamic Breaks to review the functionality specification.
"Allowed break shift": For example, a driver may spend 4 hours of his driving time and duty time to drive between the distribution centre (DC) and stop X. The operation duration to unload an order a stop X is 3 hours (total time will be 7 hours). Meanwhile, the dynamic break settings are set to allocate break time window after driving time and duty time of 6 hours and 30 minutes. The scheduler engine is designed to respect the driver break time and never ignores it or allocates the break time period later than 6 hours and 30 minutes, and the driver's break time is a too restricted constraint at the scheduling engine. Therefore, we had to develop a parameter at the dynamic break settings that provides the scheduling engine the opportunity and flexibility to shift the break time earlier than the expected. Having the ability to shift the break time will help the scheduling engine to generate the low-cost runs. For the Allowed break shift we set the minimum allowable hours to the scheduler engine not to be exceeded while allocating the break time period for the route. As a results, according to the screenshot, the scheduler engine is allowed to move the driver break time period 2 hours earlier (after 4 hours and 30-minutes of driving and working time).

The expected route is as follows:

Q: How is "Driving time correction factor" parameter actually calculated?

Example: Destination A Destination B

The routing provider may provide the distance matrix calculation between both destinations 1 hour, comparing to the reality this one hour can be inaccurate. Therefore we have the option "Driving time correction factor" (DTC) that can re-calculate the time provided by the routing provider and adjust the time factor to provide closer results comparing to the fact time.

If the correction factor will be 1 then the system will not do any changes and will provide the actual routing results provided by the routing provider. If the correction factor will be 1.5, then the system will multiply 1.5 X the time factor provided by the routing provider = the time provided by the routing provider + the half of the time provided by the routing provider (Increased 50 %)

FAQ