New maps 2015 with improved driving time estimation

We have updated our map material to the current state of 2015.

At the same time we improved the driving time estimation of the schedule calculation. For the first time, the driving time of a street segment will be estimated based on historic driving times collected by navigation system providers and mobile telephone carriers from the movement patterns of millions of drivers.

These improvements, together with changes in the road network may affect driving times between customers, so we recalculated them for you in portatour®. Some users might notice the change when updating the schedule for the next time.

Through this update, one part of portatour® changes: at Options there are Driving Speed settings. Previously, you were able to enter an absolute driving speed here (i.e. in miles per hour). From now on, you set how your driving speed relates to historic average driving data. For example, “on highways I drive 10% faster than the average”.

 

DrivingSpeeds

We are happy that this update improves the schedule quality considerably and adds additional optimization to the routes created by portatour® for you.

Hints:

  • Real time traffic information (for example: traffic jams caused by accidents) are not considered in route planning.
  • The historic driving times are always the average value of the whole working day. For road segments that have diverting driving times during rush hours the daily average is used as a basis for calculation.
  • Should you suffer by slow traffic based on “rush hour” traffic in cities, we recommend adapting the driving speed option on city roads, for example to “30% slower”.
  • Should you have adapted the driving speed settings already before this update, your settings have been automatically converted to the new setting.

Improved selection of starting location for route planning

In the Scheduling parameters of the Schedule you now have two new choices to select a Starting location: Automatic and GPS location.

Set on Automatic, portatour® will detect automatically if your route should start at your home location or at the last visited customer, as needed when updating the schedule during the working day.

Should you want to calculate a route from a different location – for example because you had a lunch break at a restaurant – you can now use the GPS location in portatour® Anywhere. This works on all devices with a GPS unit (all modern smartphones and tablets).

In the Scheduling parameters of the Schedule, set Starting location to GPS Location. Save and Update schedule.

Important: When portatour® first uses the GPS location your browser will ask you to confirm that portatour® can read the current location of your device. Confirm this with yes and give portatour® access to your GPS location. Should you answer “no”, portatour® will not be able to use GPS until you enable this manually in the settings of your browser. If you run into problems, contact your IT helpdesk.

Getting the current location can take – depending on device and GPS reception – several seconds. After successfully getting your location, you will see your current position on a map and the related address beside it.

StartingLocation-GPS-Location

Hint: By clicking on the map you can correct the starting location. By changing to “Manual” you can enter the address manually.

Save stores the found location and starts the schedule calculation.

The starting location remains on the “GPS Location” setting until you report a customer call. Then it will reset itself to “Automatic”.

New Synchronization Settings in Dynamics CRM: Last Customer Call Date, Addresses

With today’s update of portatour® for Dynamics CRM you get two new synchronization settings. Download the update now from our download-page.

Initialize Last Customer Call Date

When you first start to work with portatour®, you may see customers suggested for a visit who have recently been visited by you. This can be avoided by telling portatour® the correct date of the “last customer call” for a customer. If you already have this date stored somewhere in your CRM, then this new feature makes it easy to initialize it.

Navigate to “Settings” and then to “portatour® – Administration” and “Synchronization Settings”.

Choose from which entity portatour® should read the date of the last visit. In the following example, we are using a date field of the  “Appointment” entity. Click “Edit query” to create a view and define the filter:

In this example I am looking for the date of the last appointment at this customer to use it as “last customer call date”. Only appointments from the last year should be included, I use the “Start Time” field to filter older and upcoming appointments out.

Hint: Limit the “last customer call date” to a time frame which is in a realistic relation to the “call interval”. For example, using the last year. If you allow dates far away in the past, customers who have not been visited for years suddenly become very urgent to visit and portatour® will primarily suggests to visit these outdated customers before anyone else.

The view must also contain a criteria relating the entities to an example account – in the above case, the appointments are related to the account “Koch, Simone”. You define the view as a template which works for one account, portatour® will then apply it to find the correct “last call date” for all synchronized accounts. You can decide which example customer you use in the filter.

The view must return exactly one column with date values. Any additional columns with other data types are ignored by portatour®. I am using the “Start Time” column of the appointment, which contains both the time and the date of the visit. To ensure that the latest appointment is picked, I configure the sorting of the results to sort by “Start Time” in “Descending Order”. portatour® will read the date from the the first returned row.

Summing up, these are the four requirements to consider when writing this view:

  • Filter using one (related) example company.
  • Limit the results to a realistic time frame in the past, for example the “Last 1 year”. Filter out future dates.
  • Exactly one column of type “Date and Time”
  • Sort by the right column and order, typically by a date/time column in descending order.

Click on “Validate” to see the last call date portatour® would use for the example account. Verify that this conforms to your expectations.

The same principle applies for initializing contacts and leads.

Selecting the address to synchronize

Dynamics CRM offers multiple standard addresses for a record. Should “Address 1” not be the address visited by field reps, you can use this new setting to instruct portatour® to use “Address 2”.

New: Call Blocks for customers

From now on you can create “Call Blocks” for customers. A call block is effective for a defined duration and has a reason, for example “from 23rd Feb to 27th Feb contact person John Doe is out of office”. portatour® adheres to the call blocks when planning routes and will not suggest to visit a customer during a call block.

Call blocks replace the preceding “Exclude from plan” feature and bring important advantages:

  • Call blocks are always automatically terminated at a predefined date. You don’t have to remove them manually at this date and you can’t forget doing so.
  • Call blocks allow entering a reason. This way you know – even in a month – why you have blocked a customer.
  • Call blocks can be entered for future occasions. For example, you can enter that the customer is closed in summer next year.
  • There can be multiple call blocks per customer. For example, to block a customer “closed in March and October”.

Call blocks can be found and edited in the customer detail view:

call block list at customer

Call blocks can also be entered quickly from the schedule and the calendar. Open the context-menu of a suggested visit and select “new call block“.

edit call block

If the newly created call block includes the date of a suggested visit, the schedule will show a red warning message and you should update the schedule:

call block in schedule


Two tips regarding call blocks:

  • Do you want to see all customers with a call block? Use the “extended search” above the customer list and set the predefined filter “call block” to “present”.
  • Do you want to create call blocks for multiple customers in one step? Use the “extended search” to find the customers in question and then the “edit all” button below the list. In the mass-editing menu, click “new call block”.

Notes about call blocks:

  • Expired call blocks are removed automatically.
  • Appointments at customers will be included in the schedule despite a call block effective for the respective date. In other words: appointments still have the highest priority in your calendar.
  • For customers who were previously set to be “Exclude from schedule”  an unlimited call block was added automatically.
  • You cannot create unlimited call blocks. To keep a customer from being suggested in schedules, set the call interval of the customer to “none”.
  • In a future update, call blocks will also replace the holiday-field of the scheduling parameters of the customer. We will keep you informed.

P.S.: Should you be using portatour® in combination with Salesforce or Dynamics CRM, update to the newest release (download for Salesforce, download for Dynamics CRM) to access these features.

Update for quicker and easier use

New context menu in schedule and calendar

The schedule view and the calendar view have been equipped with new context menus to let you reach often used features quicker. In the schedule, open the context menu by clicking the new “down-arrow” button in the right column.

schedule suggested visit context menu

Depending on whether the entry is a suggested visit or an appointment, a different menu will appear.

schedule context menu appointment

Hint: when using a mouse, clicking the right mouse button anywhere on the line will open the menu.

Appointments instead of “fixed visit suggestions”

Beginning with the update from 16th December 2014 portatour® allows directly converting a suggested visit into an appointment, either with a fixed time or “flexible on the day”. The former “fixation” of a suggested visit is now superfluous. To reduce distractions and to keep the menus quick and easy, this outdated feature was removed. Existing fixations remain and are shown (next to where the starting time is displayed).

Warnings to encourage updating your schedule

Should the schedule not be up-to-date because of changes that were not taken into account yet, you are going to see red warning signs. This applies to changed appointments, deleted customers, or new call blocks. In each case you should update your schedule to receive a schedule that reflects these changes.

schedule with warnings

Reservations: new symbol and improved list

Customers who are included in the schedule by reservation are marked with a new symbol: a star, shown left in the schedule.

reservation in schedule

To support a uniform look & feel, the same symbol is also shown in the customer detail view next to the buttons “include in schedule” and “remove reservation”.

Also the list of reservations at the top of the schedule view bears the star icon. The list of reservations can now show either the customers where a reservation has been created but which were not included in the schedule yet  (as previously) or a list of all reservations – both the ones included in the schedule and the ones still to include.

reservations

Quicker mass-editing of customers

Should you want to edit multiple customers in one step, you previously had to enable the selection mode, select the intended customers, and edit the selected.

These steps are now obsolete. A new button “edit all X” below the customer list immediately takes you to mass editing.

mass editing all customers

Prerequisite is filtering the customers using “extended search” in such way that only those customers you want to edit are listed.

P.S.: Should you be using portatour® in combination with Salesforce or Dynamics CRM, update to the newest release (download for Salesforce, download for Dynamics CRM) to access these features.

End-of-year update 2014

As the year 2014 is closing we have released a substantial update for portatour® on our servers and updated releases of our integrations.

More information is available in these three news items:

We wish all portatour®-users a merry Christmas and a successful new year 2015.

Note: Between 23rd December 2014 and 6th January 2015 the majority of our team is on vacation and on stand-by-duty. Please bear with us that within this period it may take longer to answer emails.  

Convert call suggestions to appointments

The latest update offers a valuable feature addition for those who arrange their appointments in advance by calling the customer on the phone: converting a call suggestion into an appointment with a click. Should the suggested call be suitable for the customer, just convert it into an appointment with the click of a button. Updating the schedule is not necessary anymore. The appointment shows up in the schedule immediately. Converting a suggested call into an appointment works in three places in portatour®:

  • In the schedule (by clicking on the box in the call entry to the right)
  • On the customer detail page (in section “Next Call” by clicking the button)
  • In the calendar (by clicking on the suggested call)

Upon converting the suggestion you decide whether the appointment should be exactly at the suggested time or “a flexible appointment on the day“. We recommend using flexible appointments to give portatour® more room for optimization and to be able to react to unforeseen changes.

P.S. Converting suggested calls into appointments als works directly in Salesforce. As a prerequisite, install the latest release (download for Salesforce).

Improvements to portatour Report

By popular demand portatour® Report has been improved in four ways with the latest release:

  • Weekly delivery as alternative to daily: For those who find daily delivery via e-mail too frequently, switching to weekly delivery is now possible. To configure the e-mail addresses of recipients, there are now two text-fields in the reporting configuration: one for daily delivery, one for weekly delivery. The weekly report is generated and distributed on Sundays and includes – as usual – a review of the last week.
  • Request delivery via webpage instead of email: When manually requesting a report, you can now chose: either delivery via email or viewing the report immediately on a webpage. In the latter case you don’t have to wait anymore until the report is delivered into your mailbox.
  • Request reports from within user management: Should you have equipped multiple employees of your company with portatour®, you can – as Administrator or Supervisor – request reports directly from the user management options with a single click.
  • Automatic download of reports via API: This is good news for companies who are using the portatour® API: Starting now, portatour® Reports can be requested using the API in an automated fashion and can be archived directly in your file-system as HTML files.

P.S.: Should you be using portatour® in combination with Salesforce or Dynamics CRM, update to the newest release (download for Salesforce, download for Dynamics CRM) before you can setup weekly delivery. Then, set the delivery configuration directly in the portatour® settings in Salesforce, Dynamics CRM, or Connector.

New Authorization Level: Supervisor

Should your company have two or more user licenses, then so far there were two authorization levels: User and Administrator.

Since the latest update there is another level available: the Supervisor.

Like the Administrator, the Supervisor can Log in as other users with a click.Beyond this, other administrative features are not available to the Supervisor.

The Supervisor authorization level is thus especially suited for back-office and inside-sales staff who support the field reps when route-planning or for managers of field reps.

P.S.: Should you be using portatour® in combination with Salesforce or Dynamics CRM, update to the newest release (download for Salesforce, download for Dynamics CRM). Then, set the authorization level of a user of portatour® Anywhere directly in the portatour® settings in your CRM.