Travel plan

Overview and functionality

POLUMANA® route planning provides you with a comprehensive tool to plan your customer appointments carefully and purposefully. Route planning includes the following components, among others:

Automated planning of customer visit tours with the option of manual intervention

Visit suggestions are automatically determined based on visit rhythm and last visit

Optimised route planning

Planning of recurring or one-off appointments

Accommodation suggestions based on your personal hotel list

Consideration of your personal daily working hours

Consideration of whether you want to plan the tour daily from a fixed starting point (rally) or as a round trip

Consideration of the customer’s visiting times / opening hours

Display of distance to be travelled and driving time over the entire tour and the individual days

Change and optimise the entire tour or individual days

With the POLUMANA® visit report application, you also have the option of entering visit reports

iOS	Function
	Plan tour
	View tour on map
	Navigate to this address (customers)
	Create new customer appointment
	Set visit rhythm
	Remove customer from schedule
	Schedule unscheduled customer

Manage or add appointments for customers

There are many places in POLUMANA® where you can enter customer appointments or appointments without a customer reference. Appointments can generally be scheduled on any day and at any time. Depending on the duration of the visit, the rest of the day is scheduled with customers in the region. If you call up a customer appointment directly from the customer, this customer is already displayed in the appointment window.

In addition to regular customer visits, it is advisable to schedule other appointments such as workshop visits or doctor’s appointments etc.. This ensures that the app does not generate unrealistic route suggestions. You can realise this by assigning a fixed date without customer reference.

In the Customer application, you have the option of planning appointments for this customer.

You have the following options:

Choose between a one-off appointment or a series appointment

Allocation of fixed appointments

Specify the date and time of your planned visit

Reminder function

Consideration of the customer’s visit/business hours

By default, business hours are preset for all customers. By clicking on the pencil, however, you have the option of customising these business hours.

You can reset these customised business hours to the default by clicking on the recycle bin icon.

Create tour

To create a tour, call up the tour planning application in the polumana app. You will now see a list of all your customers.

The following contents are displayed in this customer list:

Customer number with name and all address data

The due date in %. The following applies:
- Below a due date of 60%, it is not recommended to approach the customer. For example, this customer has a set visit frequency of once a year and the customer has already been visited several times a year.
- A due date between 60% and 80% indicates that this customer is well visited. A start-up is not absolutely necessary here either
- A visit to the customer is recommended from a due date of 80%
- A visit is strongly recommended from a due date of 100%. The visit intervals have already been skipped a few times.
- Customer visits are unavoidable for due dates higher than 120%. Several visit intervals have been skipped since the last customer visit

The exact formula for calculating the due dates is: Due date = (days since last visit / visit frequency) * 100

Visit frequency according to customer. For each customer, you enter how often they should be visited. You also have the option of assigning an individual visit frequency for selected customers

Under “Last visit” you can see when you last visited this customer

The “next planned visit” is the date when the POLUMANA® day tour suggests this customer within a tour. This date can be changed by rescheduling

You can now select this customer list according to your requirements.

Start tour suggestion

iOS	Function
	Start tour suggestion

To start the tour suggestion, click on the Start tour suggestion icon.

Before the app calculates a route plan for you, you have the option of entering parameters manually:

You can further narrow down the customer list manually

You can specify the time period of your tour

You can determine which customers are to be selected with which due date

You can define whether you are planning a fixed starting point (rally) or a round trip

You can give this tour a unique name

After you have refined your tour planning once again, you can now start it by clicking on the “Plan tour” icon.

You will receive a tour suggestion according to your defined parameters. The screen is now divided into two units. On the left you will see the actual tour proposal and on the right you will see unscheduled customers. You can now remove customers from the tour plan and add unscheduled customers to the tour plan as required. To do this, use the icons “Remove customer from planning” and “Add unplanned customer”. The tour plan is saved by clicking on the Save button. As soon as you have saved this tour suggestion, the app immediately switches to the daily tour application.

Day tour

Within the day trip you will now see the result of the polumana trip planning. In the upper area, you will see information on the distance and general journey time for this tour. This information is also displayed for each day of the tour.

Within the daily tour application you can now

plan further appointments

delete existing appointments

optimise individual tour days after a change

optimise the entire tour after a change

Case study: Customers have cancelled appointments for tomorrow, for example. You delete the appointments from the planning and either create new appointments or the tour ends earlier due to this change. This is all optimised in a new daily or overall tour plan.

You will see dates in the lower area. If you click on the desired day, the tour for that day will open. The tour itself is displayed by clicking on the “View tour icon”.

You can define which address is the home address in the basic settings for route planning.

View Daily Visit on map

If you click on the View tour on map icon in the Day tour application, the map will open and you will now see the tour visualised. You now have the option of restricting the date in the lower area so that you only see the tour for today or tomorrow, for example. In addition, you can also assign appointments in this view by clicking on the Create new customer appointment icon at the bottom.

Please note that a new appointment can also be created without a customer reference. In this case, these are non-tour appointments such as workshop visits or similar.

The different colours in the tour itinerary mark the different days. The example above shows a tour for a whole week. Journeys are also numbered for better orientation.

User settings

Basic parameters can be set in the user settings. You have the option of setting the following basic parameters:

Calendar
- Calendar name: Enter your desired iOS calendar here
- Appointment time zone: Set the time zone in which you are planning the tour here
Day tour
- Appointment duration: This is where you define the duration of an appointment. You can of course change the duration at any time later on
- Reminder: Each appointment can be supported with a reminder function. Here you can set whether you want to set reminders for all appointments in advance. Here too, reminders can be changed at any time afterwards
Working day
- Enter your personal working hours here. The tour planner will use this data to optimise the tour for you
Addresses
- Home address: It is not mandatory to enter a home address, but it is very helpful. For so-called rally tours (i.e. not round trips), POLUMANA® tour planning will take you back to your home address every day. The next day, the tour will start again from your home address
- Hotels: You can enter as many hotels as you like here. In this context, please note the “Allow overnight stay” parameter
Allow overnight stays on
- In general, you can enter the days on which you would like to stay overnight here. The two parameters “Minimum distance to home town” and “Journey to hotel” determine whether POLUMANA® tour planning takes you to a hotel of your choice or to your home town. The entries for the distance in kilometres and minutes are responsible for this. If the hotel and the home town are too far away, the tour ends at the last customer. It is up to the employee where he stays overnight. He starts the next day where he left off.

After the tour has been completed and the customers have been visited, POLUMANA® offers the option of recording the customer visits in a structured manner in the visit reports application