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

Sometimes only certain field reps can take care of certain customers. Reasons for this may include, for example, requirements regarding language skills, specialized knowledge, or experience.

To better take this into account in automatic territory optimization, portatour now offers the “Qualifications for territory assignment” feature. This ensures that each customer is assigned to a user who meets all the necessary qualifications.

And this is how you proceed:

1. Activate and define qualifications organization-wide
2. Enter fulfilled qualifications for users
3. Enter necessary qualifications with customers
4. Perform territory optimization with qualifications

Activate and define qualifications organization-wide

1. Open the “options” in the “Workspace Organization“.
2. Click on “Qualifications for territory assignment“.
3. Select “Qualifications enabled“.
4. Enter up to 20 possible qualifications for your company line by line. If you want to assign the key for each qualification yourself, then proceed as described at Definition of user-defined selection and multiple selection fields
5. Click on “Save“.
   

Enter fulfilled qualifications for users

3. Open the details page of a user.
4. Click on the pencil in the section “Fulfilled qualifications“.
5. Select the fulfilled qualifications
6. Click on “Save“.
   

Alternatively, you have the option to set the fulfilled qualifications for multiple users via Mass editing or the Import. With mass editing, you not only have the option of replacing all qualifications, but you can also add or remove individual qualifications.

In the workspace organization in “Options > Permissions“, use the authorization “Change fulfilled qualifications for territory assignment” to specify whether these changes may only be made by administrators or also by supervisors.

In the extended user search you will find the new filter “Fulfilled qualifications“.

Enter necessary qualifications for customers

As with users, you enter the necessary qualifications for the customers via details page, mass editing or import.

In the workspace organization in “Options > Permissions“, use the authorization “Change required qualifications for territory assignment” to specify whether these changes may only be made by administrators, supervisors or users.

Perform territory optimization with qualifications

Analysis of the initial situation

The new column “Customers with unfulfilled qualifications” shows the amount of customers whose qualifications are not fulfilled by the current user. If all qualifications of all customers are met, the column is initially hidden.

The new coloring option “Color: Required qualifications” is available on the map, which colors the customers according to their necessary qualifications. This allows you to see at a glance in which regions requirements are concentrated.

The new filter “With unfulfilled qualifications“, only shows those customers whose qualifications are not met by the current user.

Start optimization

portatour® only assigns customers to users who meet all the necessary qualifications during the optimization.

Note: If you resumed an optimization or loaded a saved optimization in which qualifications were not yet enabled, set “Optimization settings > General > Qualifications for territory assignment” to “Consider” if necessary.

In the results overview, you can see the reduction of customers with unfulfilled qualifications, if there were any.

For further analysis, the same functions are available in the table and map as in the initial situation.

Note: If you deliberately want to carry out the optimization without taking qualifications into account, set “Optimization settings > General > Qualifications for territory assignment” to “Ignore“.

Simulate scenarios using manual adjustments

If you want to try out different scenarios without having to change the master data, you can use manual adjustments. This allows you to make specific changes to qualifications required by customers and qualifications fulfilled by users.

Note: Qualifications for territory assignment are not yet available if portatour® is connected to Dynamics CRM as the data source system.

Have you ever had the case that appointments “flexible on the day” were not scheduled in the schedule because not all appointments could be accommodatedwithin working hours?

With the update released today, that is now a thing of the past.

From now on, working hours will also be dynamically extended for appointments “flexible on the day” if this is absolutely necessary. The business hours of customers will continue to be taken into account if any are entered for the respective day.

Appointments are crucial when calculating your schedule. You now have the option of scheduling appointments flexibly within a week instead of just on a fixed day. In addition, appointments are prioritized depending on their flexibility.

Appointments flexible in the week

Are you familiar with this? You have agreed with a customer to visit them in a certain week, but until now you had no way of creating a flexible appointment for the week. Instead, you had to create an appointment at a specific time or an appointment “flexible on the day”.

You can now create an appointment “flexible in the week” for a customer as follows:

1. Open the customer detail page and click on “New appointment“
2. At Schedule, select the option “Flexible in the week” and then the desired calendar week from the list or via the calendar

Call suggestions and existing appointments can also be converted into appointments flexible in the week:

1. Open the context menu of an entry at calendar or schedule
2. Click on “Convert to appt. flexible in the week“

Appointments flexible in the week will be included in the next schedule calculation within the selected week, taking into account your working hours and customer opening hours.

For better differentiation, appointments flexible in the week and on the day are marked with corresponding symbols.

Note: This function is not yet available if portatour® is connected to Dynamics CRM as the data source system.

Appointments prioritized according to flexibility

If appointments with different flexibility conflict with each other or not all appointments can be accommodated in the schedule, the following prioritization will apply in future:

1. All-/Multiday appointments
2. on time planned appointments
3. Appointments flexible on the day and appointments with leeway
4. Appointments flexible in the week

Reservations and call suggestions are still prioritized lower than appointments.

Would you like to use appointments and holidays that you manage in Google in portatour® for your customer call schedule without having to enter them manually twice? With the calendar subscription feature for Google released today, you can do this in just a few steps.

The configuration and use is analogous to Subscribe to the calendar from Outlook under “Options” > “Calendar subscriptions” > “add” and then “Login with Google”.