Overview of Route Management Processes

You use the route management functionality to plan and manage your organization's routes and the route services (that is, the services provided when each route is executed), along with processing the contracts related to the routes. In the system, you create the general routes, and for each particular execution of the route, you create route executions. Each stop in the route execution is a route appointment—that is, an appointment with a service order type of the Route behavior. Each route execution is based on a particular route and inherits some of its settings.

You can track your executed routes by using Bing maps and get the statistics on each execution of a route, such as the distance and the time needed to execute the route. With the integration between the route management and the service management of MYOB Advanced, you can create appointments related to route executions and generate invoices for services that have been provided.

You use the route management forms to perform a variety of procedures related to processing routes and related documents and entities. These procedures are briefly described in the following sections of this topic.

Route Management Functionality

Each route execution created by using the route management functionality has appointments (which are related to service orders). After the appointments and the route execution are completed or closed, you generate billing documents of the appropriate type.

Along with billing documents, you can generate inventory documents such as issues and receipts (the Inventory Management feature should be additionally enabled on the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000) form).

The documents are further processed, and financial transactions are posted to the General Ledger. In the following figure, you can see the flow of documents from the Route Management module.

Managing Staff Members (Drivers)

The integration of the route management with the service management gives you the ability to define drivers in the system in order to track and assign them to routes. A driver is staff member that can perform services related to routes. You can quickly and easily select the most appropriate available person to deliver your services.

Managing Vehicles

You can enter and store information about each vehicle of your company. Because the route management is integrated with the equipment management, each vehicle can be also tracked there. By using the route management, you can quickly select a vehicle to execute a route from all available vehicles.

Managing and Processing Routes

MYOB Advanced provides tools that make it possible to create and process routes quickly as well as optimize them to minimize gas consumption and travel time. With Bing Maps integrated into the route management, the system calculates the distances and time of the executed route. If you rearrange the order of the appointments in the route to be executed, Bing Maps plots and calculates the route again. You can easily track executed routes and their appointments for particular days and staff members that execute routes by using Bing Maps.

Processing Route Service Contracts

By using the rout service contracts, you can ease the processing of repeat customers' appointments that require route planning. You can create schedules when the services need to be performed, and based on these schedules, the system can generate the routes to be executed, with appointments automatically assigned to them. This reduces time and errors when users are entering the necessary routes into the system.