Opt for innovative territory optimization!

Territory planning software needs to know exactly where your customers are located on the map. This is the only way to ensure precise planning. The inaccuracy of postcode-based tools can easily add up to 15 minutes of extra travel time per customer.

portatour^® automatically converts addresses into geo-coordinates without incurring additional costs. It can convert up to 100,000 addresses per minute, even if they contain spelling mistakes.

The actual road network has a big influence on travel times to customers. If an address is 10 kilometres away as the crow flies, it might take 10 minutes to get there in rural areas, but over an hour in the city. Rivers, lakes and mountains can have a similar effect if there is no way across or they cause a significant detour. Using straight-line distances instead of the actual road network makes calculation results error-prone. portatour^® always uses real routes, taking account of historical driving speeds on each road section and thus providing the most accurate results possible.

Customer visit intervals have a big impact on travel time in the field. If you visit a customer weekly instead of monthly, all that time spent in the car really adds up. Also, perhaps there are nearby customers with a “compatible” interval whom you could visit in the same day trip. You can either drive 50 kilometres for a single appointment or visit an additional 5 customers on the way there: imagine the difference in efficiency!

Customers with heavily restricted business hours (like doctors’ surgeries for example) have an impact on travel times. You may often find you can’t call on two geographically close customers in the same day trip because they open on different days.

Call duration has a major impact on the number of customer visits you can make each day. With fewer visits per day, the daily journey to and from an area has a greater influence on total travel time in that territory. Whereas with more daily visits, the main influence is the travel time between them. portatour^® takes the call duration of each individual customer into account.

The shorter the daily working hours, the more negative the impact of customers who are based further away. In an 8-hour working day, a 3-hour round trip may still be justifiable, as 5 customer calls are feasible in the remaining 5 hours. But in a 4-hour day, the same round trip is no longer acceptable because there’s only time for one customer call. When optimizing your territory, portatour^® takes the working hours of each individual weekday (including break settings) into account.

When it comes to geographically large areas, overnight stays can have a huge influence on total travel time. For example, overnighting in a hotel can save 4 hours driving to/from the area; time that can be used for customer calls instead. Unless your territory planning software factors this in, the results are useless. portatour^® lets you make various settings for each field rep’s overnight stays, taking account of factors such as minimum distance from home, maximum number of consecutive overnight stays and the days of the week when overnighting is allowed. Each setting has a significant impact on optimization.

Field reps make their customer calls by completing personal daily routes. So the better your strategic territory planning handles the requirements of and influences on daily route planning, the more efficiently your people can do their job. portatour^® factors everything in, with accurate geocoding, real routes, call intervals, business hours, call durations, working hours and overnight stays.

During customer calls, there’s no guarantee that the contact person will actually meet your field rep or have time for a call – especially if it’s unscheduled. It’s important to take account of this in territory optimization, because the lower the contact rate, the higher the proportion of travel time and the higher the workload. Field reps may have to call on a customer several times before they succeed. With portatour^®, you can configure this contact rate and apply it to the simulated daily tours, giving you realistic results.

Every year, the road network changes by up to 15%. New roads, bridges and tunnels open, new traffic-calming zones emerge, and one-way, turning and speed regulations change. These changes affect your team’s travel times. Unless maps are updated often enough, you will end up with a distorted picture of each field rep’s workload, and your optimizations will not deliver the best results. At portatour ^®, we update road maps (including speed data) quarterly. You don’t need to do a thing, and we don’t charge you for the updates.

Local installation usually means you’re dependent on your IT department for resources. And the more people who need to use the territory planning software, the more installation work is involved. portatour^® requires no installation – all you need is a web browser.

Conventional territory planning applications are Windows programs that only run on Windows PCs. So people who like to use Macs or tablets on the go can’t use these tools. portatour^® has none of these restrictions. You can access portatour^® and all its features from any device with a modern web browser.

Territory optimization requires a lot of computing power. Conventional office PCs are generally not built for that. The older the PC or the less powerful the processor, the slower the calculations. At portatour^®, we only use cutting-edge, high-performance servers – regardless of the device you’re using to access our software. Each of these servers has around 50 times the computing power of an average office PC. And the speed to match.

Territory planning, address geocoding and travel time analysis etc. require map data. Depending on the geographical coverage (country, continent, worldwide) and level of detail, this consumes up to several gigabytes on a hard drive. Installing conventional territory planning software locally eats up space on your PCs. With portatour^®, the data is stored centrally on the SaaS servers, so you don’t need any storage space.

Like the initial installation, conventional software updates involve manual work, delays and potential dependence on your IT department. At portatour^®, our SaaS servers are updated automatically and transparently several times a year. You don’t need to do a thing, and you won’t have to wait around.

Traditional software usually focuses on visualizing various geographical data in a host of different ways. A wide range of tools and the appropriate groundwork then makes it possible to use the software for planning sales territories, among other things. Users need a lot of training, and certain sales territory optimization requirements are left out or poorly implemented. portatour^®, on the other hand, is fully dedicated to sales territory optimization. We paid a great deal of attention to the requisite features when developing our software, making it intuitive to use and free of the distractions caused by unnecessary functions.

The more complex a user interface is designed, the more difficult it is to use in practice and the more time it takes to train users. There’s also a high risk of forgetting how to use the software if you stop working with it for a few weeks or months. Conventional territory planning software often has a complex structure that can frustrate new users. With portatour^®, however, territory optimization takes the form of an intuitive wizard that only displays the features required for each step. This makes the user interface clear and easy to learn, which quickly leads to a sense of achievement.

In order to use conventional geomarketing software for sales territory optimization, users tend to need intensive training followed by regular practice. Generally speaking, only a few people in the company get to grips with these time-consuming demands. As a result, use is often limited to these few people and improvement potential stays untapped for a long time. We consciously made portatour^® very easy to learn, so that anyone responsible for field sales can profit from territory analysis and optimization at any time. For example, a team member is absent and the regional manager needs to plug the gap: portatour^® makes this so much smoother and easier.

The more settings allowed by optimization software, the better the requirements of the program can be met. However, every additional setting option also increases the risk of failing to find a suitable solution, if any, when all of these (possibly even contradictory) settings are taken into account. Many conventional territory planning solutions then abort the calculation with an unhelpful general error message. In these situations, portatour^® instead tries to find the most effective solutions based on the settings. Warning messages explain any deviations from the settings, or an error message appears, giving the most helpful information as to why the request isn’t feasible.

Territory planning and optimization often requires several peer reviews before making a decision and implementing a new territory structure. With conventional planning software, it’s often necessary to resort to printouts or PDF exports. With portatour^®, however, a few clicks is all it takes to share results with other users in the application itself. Another bonus of this is that the other users can continue working with a copy of the results, tweaking and optimizing them further if necessary.

Field reps’ time is expensive and hence valuable (see blog article: How much does my field force cost and can good planning reduce it?). So it follows that as many of their working hours as possible should be spent visiting customers, and not on the road. There’s also the cost of fuel consumption and vehicle wear and tear to consider, and last but not least, the environmental impact of unnecessary mileage. That’s why one goal of territory optimization is to cut down driving time and distance. Conventional sales territory planning software usually only supports this to a limited extent, as it optimizes based on inaccurate estimates at best (see “Accuracy & quality”). portatour^® is different. It’s based on route simulation using actual routes, making the optimization as realistic as possible. What’s more, it doesn’t just present you with a single solution, but up to 7 proposals that prioritize travel time reduction vs. workload balance in different ways. You can switch between these solutions in a matter of seconds to compare them.

In field sales, call time and travel time accounts for most of the workload. When optimizing your territory, you need to allocate that workload between individual field reps in a way that makes the most of their working hours – i.e. giving them neither too much nor too little to do. Too much leads to unrealistic expectations and consequently to unhappy employees; too little wastes human resources. Traditional territory optimization software usually only supports this goal to a limited extent, as the optimization is based on inaccurate estimates at best (see “Accuracy & quality”). With portatour^®, however, optimization is based on route simulation, taking account of call intervals, call durations, contact rates, working hours and much more. This means that the workload is calculated as realistically as possible. What’s more, it doesn't just present you with a single solution, but up to 7 different proposals that prioritize travel time reduction vs. workload balance in different ways. You can switch between these solutions in a matter of seconds to compare them.

The purpose of customer calls by your sales force is to directly or indirectly increase the company’s turnover. So it follows that more frequent visits normally boost turnover. Territory optimization allows you to make additional time for customer visits by reducing travel time or compensating for situations where workload is too light. Conventional territory optimization software usually only supports this goal to a limited extent, as it uses inaccurate estimates at best (see “Accuracy & quality”). With portatour^®, however, optimization is based on realistic route simulations. Each customer visit you gain through better optimization will ultimately translate into higher turnover.

Typically, your team visits customers at different intervals (e.g. weekly, monthly or quarterly) depending on their priority (e.g. ABC classification). These priorities reflect the sales figures or sales potential that you want to maintain or increase by making visits. In some cases, visit frequency may be governed by binding agreements with customers. Territory optimization and resource planning should ensure you can meet all these desired intervals. Conventional territory optimization software usually only supports this goal to a limited extent, as the optimization is based on inaccurate estimates at best (see “Accuracy & quality”). In practice this often leads to overload, which in turn leads to interval creep, or in the worst case, you stop visiting certain customers at all. With portatour^®, on the other hand, optimization is based on realistic route simulations, helping you identify and manage overload in good time.

In geographically large territories, overnight stays are an appropriate way to reduce travel time and fit in more customer calls. Overnighting in a hotel instead of driving home could save 4 hours of travel time (2 hours each way). Nevertheless, good territory optimization should reduce the number of overnight stays. Hotel accommodation costs money, and it’s usually not very popular with employees either. Conventional territory planning software generally doesn’t factor in overnight stays and so it can’t optimize them. portatour^® optimization is based on realistic route simulations, where overnight stays are taken into account and minimized, saving on hotel costs and boosting employee satisfaction.

If you have more work than people, or you want to open up new geographical regions, it’s hard to determine in advance how many new field reps you need and where they should ideally live. The number of employees not only has a major impact on your budget but also plays a key role in choosing the best home locations. A simple example: If you hire one person in a new territory, you ideally want them to be based in the centre of that area. If you hire two in the same territory, they should ideally be located in a north-south or east-west split. Conventional territory planning software tends to be of limited help here, as workloads are based on inaccurate estimates at best (see “Accuracy & quality“) and resource planning is often a manual process. With portatour^®, on the other hand, optimization is based on realistic route simulations that automatically evaluate various numbers of new employees and various home locations. So you won’t just be presented with one solution, but a variety of options. You can switch between these in a matter of seconds to compare them.

When a field rep is leaving or has left the company and there’s no immediate replacement, you need to allocate their customers efficiently to nearby colleagues, whose new workload you then have to determine. Likewise, these employees may also need to pass on customers to their nearby colleagues in order to avoid overload. Conventional territory planning software is usually only of limited help here, as workloads are based on inaccurate estimates at best (see “Accuracy & quality”), and constraints on or specifications for customer allocation can’t be factored in automatically. That’s why portatour^® determines workload based on realistic route simulations, and the departing-employee scenario is covered by plenty of setting options.

Territory optimization can often boost efficiency by over 10%. But in some companies, customer handovers can entail considerable work upfront, for example arranging for customers to interview the new account manager and setting up a handover meeting. So you might choose to forego one or two percentage points in efficiency gains if it significantly reduces the handover work. For example, a solution that “only” increases efficiency by 8% and requires handing over an average of 40 customers per field rep may be preferable to one that boosts efficiency by 10% but requires an average handover of 120 customers per field rep. Conventional territory optimization software often doesn’t allow for these constraints. By contrast, with portatour^® the maximum number of customers to be transferred from or to a field rep can be limited individually for each employee. This allows you to get the most out of small changes to customer assignments.

Sometimes, customer-field rep assignments can’t be changed. There may be various reasons for this, for instance a personal relationship that has developed over many years, specific support requirements or a contractual commitment. Automatic territory optimization must not affect these special assignments. On the contrary, they may even be critical in shaping the new territory. Conventional territory planning software often can’t handle these in the way that you’d like. But portatour^® supports fixed assignments and even has several technical options for storing them.

Sometimes, not all customers are equal when it comes to optimizing territories. This requires a more differentiated approach. For instance, sales, potential, ABC classification or similar customer characteristics can play a role. This means that alongside your main optimization goals such as reducing travel time and balancing workload, the optimization has to comply with other user-defined parameters. For example, let’s say that each employee should have an annual sales potential of at least €500,000, but a maximum of 25 A customers and between 100 and 200 leads in the territory. Compliance with these parameters complicates the optimization process. Conventional territory optimization software either can’t take them into account at all or is severely limited in the way it implements them. With portatour^®, on the other hand, you can create up to 10 additional parameters and store specifications for them. If the software can’t find a solution that meets all the requirements, it suggests the best options based on your guidelines, and displays warning messages explaining any deviations.

In some cases, instead of assigning individual customers to field reps, you might prefer to assign them collectively in groups. The groupings might be geographical, e.g. all customers in a certain postcode must be assigned to the same employee. But other groupings are conceivable, too. For example, you might want the same field rep to cover all the branches of a chain in a particular area. Conventional territory planning software often only allows for basic geographical clustering. With portatour^®, territory optimization, however, you’re free to group customers in any way you choose.

Territory optimization doesn’t necessarily mean moving customers between field reps. Even simply adjusting the intervals between calls to individual customers can deliver above-average efficiency gains. For this type of optimization, it’s important to know the real travel time for each customer. Conventional territory planning software can usually only estimate this as the crow flies, whereas portatour^® uses a complex algorithm to determine it as precisely as possible. This includes a customer’s call interval, their travel time proportion on potential day trips, taking account of travel times to other customers in the vicinity (if visit intervals, business hours and visit durations are “compatible”), the journey from/to home as a proportion of the day, the typical traffic conditions during working hours and possible overnight stays. If customers take up a relatively long drive per call, it may make sense to call on them less frequently.

Example: portatour^® usually takes about 30 seconds to import and automatically geocode 20,000 new addresses – even if they contain typos. Conventional territory planning programs often take more than 15 minutes to to this.

Example: portatour^® usually takes about 1 minute to complete a travel time analysis for 50 territories with 20,000 customers. Conventional territory planning programs can’t do this analysis; it’s too complex for them, so they only calculate straight-line, “as the crow flies” distances.

Example: portatour^® generally takes just 1–5 minutes to optimize 50 territories with 20,000 customers. And you won’t just get one solution, but up to 7 different proposals with travel time reduction vs. workload balance prioritized in different ways. You can switch between these options in a matter of seconds to compare them. Conventional territory planning programs often require a whole hour to produce just one solution. Throw in a change of prioritization, and you’ll have to wait another hour.

A common challenge for field sales managers is estimating the impact of planned changes in order to make an informed decision. Planned changes don’t necessarily mean customer reassignment. Other scenarios might be, “What if we visit all A customers every 21 days instead of every 30?” or “What if some field reps work from home on Fridays and don’t visit customers?”. In these cases, you want to quickly determine the impact on important parameters (especially employee workload and compliance with call intervals). With conventional territory optimization software, you sometimes have to make bulk changes to the master data. This is time-consuming, hard to track and often even harder to modify or undo. In contrast, the portatour^® territory planning wizard has built-in templates for these scenarios. Instead of changing the master data itself, you create temporary change instructions that you can track, edit and undo with with a single click.

If you have created a scenario by manipulating data using conventional territory planning software, it’s often difficult to see the impact at a glance. You have only got screenshots to go on, while manually working out the differences with a calculator or in a program like Excel. With portatour^®, on the other hand, you have a direct before/after comparison for every parameter in every territory. What’s more, if your scenario consists of several individual actions (e.g. changing the call interval of A customers and B customers differently), one click on the action is enough to temporarily deactivate or activate it, showing you its impact on the overall scenario in a matter of seconds.

In many cases and for various reasons, conventional territory planning software is only used once a year. It may be that importing current data into the software is time-consuming, that only one person knows how to use it (and rarely has time) or that the calculation process is painfully slow. In all these cases, optimization involves a ton of manual work, only to deliver suboptimal results. portatour^® territory optimization, on the other hand, is designed for more frequent use. We call this “dynamic territory optimization”. After all, day-to-day business is dynamic by nature. Planned and unforeseen events throughout the year can make (temporary) territory optimization useful or necessary. Field reps might leave the company, go on extended sick leave or parental leave, switch to part-time work or relocate. But changes in your customer base, such as a larger number of customers joining or leaving the books, can also have a permanent or temporary impact. And there may be changes to the sales strategy, be it call frequency, a focus on new customers or a longer expected call duration when you need to introduce and explain new products. Unless your territory and call planning responds to these situations effectively and in good time, efficiency and sales will fall by the wayside.

With conventional territory planning software, there’s often only one user who can handle the software, e.g. because it’s only installed on their PC and only they have completed the extensive training required. This person then becomes a bottleneck when switching to dynamic territory optimization, leaving improvement potential untapped for a long time. With portatour^®, the target user group is much larger. Everyone with responsibility for field sales (e.g. regional managers) can leverage territory optimization and analysis at any time. And because portatour^® licensing is based on the number of field reps, there’s no additional cost for more users.

In light of legal requirements (GDPR) and economic interests, data protection and security are key issues for every company. The ISO27001 standard exists for compliance with information security standards. Most manufacturers of territory planning software fall short of its requirements. At portatour^®, however, both our data centre and every department in the company are ISO27001 certified. Compliance is subject to an annual external audit. portatour^® also complies with ISO27018, which is specifically aimed at cloud providers.

From a data protection and security perspective, transferring data to third parties unnecessarily is best avoided. But many manufacturers of territory planning software use third-party services either to operate the software (e.g. Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS) or for geoservices (e.g. geocoding of addresses via Google Maps, calculation of distance matrices via HERE) that the software itself can only implement slowly or poorly, if at all. With portatour^®, no data is transferred to third parties, as the software is operated on our servers, which also run all geoservices.

From a GDPR perspective, data from European companies should, if possible, only be processed within the EU. Many manufacturers of territory planning software directly or indirectly use services from providers in the USA, which means that the data leaves the European Union. At portatour^®, all our servers are located in the EU. This is the only place where we process data.

Data protection violations by European companies can result in large fines. This is why companies should only work with IT providers that guarantee GDPR compliance. At portatour^®, data processing is GDPR-compliant. We’re happy to provide you with an order processing contract for this purpose.

Strategic territory planning and operational route planning have a big influence on sales force efficiency. So any business with a sales force must address both in order to be and stay competitive. Most manufacturers of territory planning software don’t offer a solution for daily route planning. With portatour^®, you get both from a single source. With over 15 years of experience and more than 1,500 companies that have already opted for portatour^®, you’re in safe hands.

Territory and route planning go hand in hand. They involve the same people (field reps and their managers) and the same data (customers). With conventional providers, you buy two different applications for territory and route planning. This creates IT work and is prone to errors during additional data synchronization. Furthermore, users face a bigger learning curve as they have to learn two – usually significantly different – interfaces. With portatour^®, territory and route planning are integrated in one and the same application. Both modules access the same database of employee and customer data. The user interface has a standardized design, so it takes no time at all to learn.