Category Archives: Anywhere

Extension of the user management

This news concerns administrators from company accounts with at least two users.

User list and user detail page

Click on a user in the user list to open the new user detail view. To get the context menu as usual, click on the “arrow down” symbol on the right or use the right mouse button.

Copy access link to clipboard

User details offers the new option of copying the access link of a user to the clipboard and then sending it to that user in a different way than email.

Selection mode and mass editing in user list

Below the user list, you will find buttons for starting selection mode and mass editing. The mass editing currently offers the functions to manage the login options of users, e.g. activate logins, send invitations and access links, deactivate logins.

Extension of the display of custom fields

Show longer field names

When displaying custom fields, field names were previously abbreviated from 10 characters. Now that mobile devices have become larger, it is only abbreviated from 20 characters.

Note: If you change the field names in the process, please note that the column names in the export file will also be affected. This must be taken into account if the file is processed automatically. A change of field names has no effect on the import.

Change the position of field names

Previously, field names were always displayed on the left and the field content on the right.

This behavior can now be changed individually for each field group in order to make better use of the screen space, especially for long or multi-line texts:

The following screenshots illustrate the effects of the three different settings:

Always left:

Above for multi-line text fields:

Always above:

Notes:

  • For newly created field groups, the setting “Above for multi-line text fields” is preset. This is also our recommendation.
  • This setting also affects the window for editing custom fields.

Display of field group names

If your custom fields are divided into several groups at reports, the group names are now also displayed in the views. The effect is particularly visible if reports are not truncated in the list views, but completely displayed instead. The user can set this in their own options under “Program settings > Customer list > Entire report” or “Program settings > Report list > Entire report”.

Territory optimization: Search for suitable home locations for a territory

This news concerns administrators and supervisors of company accounts with activated territory optimization.

If you are responsible for the field sales force, you may be familiar with the situation when you are looking for a new field rep for an unserviced sales territory: you consider in which cities or regions you would like to search for candidates and what impact different home locations have on the expected driving time in a territory.

The new “Home location suitability” function at portatour® provides an answer to precisely this question. And this is how you proceed:

  1. Start a territory optimization.
  2. Go to “Initial situation> Settings”.
  3. In the “Other” section, change the “Home location suitability” from “Do not calculate” to “Calculate”.
  4. Click on “Update now” in the yellow message to recalculate the initial situation.
  5. Go to “Initial situation > Map”.
  6. Use the options cogwheel at the top right to switch to “Display: Home location suitability”.
  7. Select the desired territory in the selection box below.

You will now see the customers of the selected territory colored according to a green-yellow-red scale. Green locations (5 stars) are very suitable as home location for the area, red locations (0 stars) are rather unsuitable.

By clicking on the respective location, you will receive further detailed information on the field rep if they would be responsible for the territory from this home location. This detailed information is also included in the automatic evaluation of the home location suitability.

Note: Calculating the home location suitability significantly slows down the calculations of the initial situation. Switch it off again in the settings of the initial situation when you no longer need this function.

Territory optimization: Extended overnight stay and driving speed settings

This news concerns administrators and supervisors of company accounts with activated territory optimization.

There are three new settings under “Initial situation > Settings” to adapt the territory analysis and optimization even better to your situation. The layout of this page has also been revised.

Users: Overnight stay > Willingness to stay overnight

When calculating the expected number of overnight stays, territory optimization takes into account all settings for overnight stays in portatour®. Nevertheless, in practice it can happen that the field rep spends the night away from home more frequently or less frequently, e.g. due to manual overnight stays at home location or in hotels.

To take this into account in the territory optimization, you can influence the number of overnight stays with the new “willingness to stay overnight” setting. “Low” leads to fewer calculated overnight stays and more driving time, “High” to more overnight stays and less driving time.

Under “Manual adjustments > User modifications”, this setting can be edited individually for each user. If you want to edit this setting individually in the initial situation, set “Editable per user” to “Yes”.

Note: Please note that changing the setting does not affect the number of overnight stays in all cases. If, for example, only a few customers meet the criteria for overnight stays away from home, increasing the willingness to stay overnight will not lead to more overnight stays, as more overnight stays are not required or permitted.

Users: Customer reachability > Maximum overnight stays from home location

In addition to the maximum distance or maximum driving time, this setting allows you to specify the maximum geographical extent of a territory. By default, a customer must be reachable with a maximum of one overnight stay from the home location – this usually corresponds to a distance of over 1,000 km. If you want to allow even larger territories in exceptional cases, set this value to “Any”. This will slow down the calculation speed.

Under “Manual adjustments > User modifications”, this setting can be edited individually for each user. If you want to edit this setting individually in the initial situation, set “Editable per user” to “Yes”.

Driving speed

portatour® uses historical driving speed data collected by navigation system and mobile phone providers by measuring the movement data of millions of road users and making it available for the respective road sections.

To deviate from these average values during territory optimization, use this setting. The changed setting applies equally to all territories.

Territory optimization: Further improvements

This news concerns administrators and supervisors of company accounts with activated territory optimization.

  • In the table views, clicking on the column heading “Users” displays the additional columns “Working hours” and “Share of working hours”.
  • It is now possible to perform user modifications and customer modifications in post processing. Use this option if you are satisfied with the optimized customer assignment, but would also like to evaluate and apply the effect of different customer or user settings.
  • When exporting territory optimization customers, there is a new selection option “Customers included in the result”. This means that customers that you have excluded in the initial situation are not exported.

More custom fields possible

Previously, the number of custom fields for customers, appointments, tasks and reports was limited to 100. This limit has now been extended to 250.

IP-based access restrictions

This news affects administrators of company accounts with at least two users.

Would you like to allow access to your portatour® only from certain IP addresses – e.g. to allow only managed company devices that are logged into your LAN or VPN? Then proceed as follows:

  1. Switch to the company workspace.
  2. Open the options.
  3. In the “Security” section, click on “IP-based access restrictions”.
  4. For those user authorization levels where you want to restrict access, set the selection box to “Restricted”.
  5. In the input field below, enter the IP addresses or IP ranges from which access should be permitted. Multiple entries must be separated by a line break.
  6. Click “Save”. The access restriction takes effect immediately.

Users who are successfully logged in but are accessing it from an unauthorized IP address will receive the following error message:

Notes:

  • Handle these restrictions carefully. There is a high risk of inadvertently locking yourself or other users in your company out.
  • Ideally, you should store several IP addresses, e.g. redundant IP addresses for your office, so that you can continue to access portatour® in case of an emergency. Make sure that these IP addresses are static.
  • If you make changes to your company’s network configuration, remember to remove the restrictions or add additional IP addresses in time.
  • Only IPv4 addresses are supported – no IPv6 addresses.

Merging two customer records

It’s a common problem: you have exactly the same customer listed twice in portatour® Anywhere.

This often happens if you originally added the customer to portatour® manually as they were initially only a prospect. The customer’s details were then carried over to your company’s ERP system and automatically imported to portatour®. So you end up with duplicates in portatour®.

Our new “Merge customer” feature eliminates these duplicates while ensuring you don’t lose any data. Here’s how to use it:

  1. Open the Details view of a customer whose records you want to merge.
  2. Below the details, click “Actions”, “Merge customer”.
  3. Now find the second customer record – the one you want to merge the first one with.
  4. A new window opens, showing you a comparison of the data for both customers.
  5. In the “Target customer” row, select which of the two data records you want to keep.
  6. In the other rows, select which data you want to transfer across. You can also combine text fields by selecting the “Combined” column on the right.
  7. Click “Merge”
  8. The selected data and all the data records linked to it (appointments, tasks, reports and call blocks) will be transferred to the target customer. The other customer will be sent to the recycle bin.

Voilà! The duplicate is gone.

Note:

  • Limited permissions:
    • This feature is basically only available if you have user permissions for “Customer > Delete” and “Reports > Edit history”.
    • Limited permissions may disable the selections you can make in some fields that you want to transfer customer data from. In such cases, the target customer’s data is used.
  • If only one of the two records has an external ID, select this as the target customer. This is also the default setting. The external ID indicates a (regular) data import.
  • By default, the table only displays the fields in which the data of the two customers differ. For these fields, portatour® tries to find a preselection that makes sense. If necessary, adjust the selection. To see fields with identical data as well, switch from “With conflict” to “All” in the dropdown box at the top.
  • If you want to merge three or more customer records, simply repeat the above steps several times.
  • This feature is not available if portatour® is linked to a data source system (e.g. Salesforce, Dynamics CRM or Veeva CRM).