Tourplanning+ works from a single screen. The toolbar at the top selects who and when, the middle shows the plan, and the bar at the bottom runs the optimisation and saves the result.
The toolbar
From left to right:
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Plan for: choose Users or Equipment. The icon beside it shows which you are in, and your choice is remembered. This control only appears if you have the Equipment module. See Equipment planning.
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Users: pick a team, and the people within it, whose work you want to plan.
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Period: the days you are planning. A Today button returns you to the current day, and arrows step one day at a time. The arrows are hidden when you select a period longer than a day. The calendar offers ready-made periods grouped under Week and Month.
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View: three buttons that change how the middle of the screen presents the plan. Stacked, Timeline and Plan tour. Plan tour is where you start.
A period can be at most 31 days. Optimisation quality and speed both fall away over longer stretches, and there is a ceiling on how many stops one run can handle. Plan a month at a time.
The four views
Within Plan tour the middle of the screen has four tabs. They show the same plan in four different ways, and each one has its own page.
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Tab |
What it is for |
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Your people against the days of the period. Shows who has work, who is away and which days changed, and it is how you choose the days you want to open. This is where a session starts. |
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Every route, every stop, with times, addresses and driving gaps. This is where you check whether a day is deliverable, and where you rearrange work by hand. A counter on the tab shows how many routes are open. |
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The same routes drawn on a map. The fastest way to see whether a day makes geographic sense. |
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What the last optimisation changed, job by job, with the totals before and after. Read this before you save. |
Stacked and Timeline
These two buttons show the same plannings in the shape used elsewhere in Microbizz. Stacked puts a person's plannings on top of one another regardless of length. Timeline lays them out side by side, so their width reflects duration. If you already use Planning+, these will look familiar.
The task panel
The task list runs down the right-hand side and holds the work available to be planned. You can search and filter it, and drag a task straight into somebody's route or into the unplanned area so the next optimisation includes it.
Filters in the task panel do not currently behave reliably in every case, and editing a filter from here is cramped. If a filter returns less than you expect, check it against the task module before trusting the result. Details on Good to know about Tourplanning+.
The bottom bar
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The status panel shows what an optimisation would currently consider, for example "12 tasks to plan and 4 users to plan for". Check it before running, since it catches most mistakes.
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Reload discards everything on screen and fetches what is stored. This is your undo.
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Save writes the current plan. It is greyed out until there is something to save.
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Run auto-plan sends the work to the optimiser and returns a proposal.
Run auto-plan changes nothing permanent. You can run it, review the result, run it again with different settings, and walk away without touching the real plan. Only Save commits.
Next: 2.1 Calendar view