Welcome to Parlevel’s feature spotlight video series where we highlight popular and powerful features inside Parlevel’s suite of unattended technology tools. Today, we are taking a look at our Dynamic Routing and Smart Routing features.
Routing with the Parlevel VMS provides everything you need to effectively and efficiently service and collect on your point of sale assets, including vending, micro markets, smart stores, and OCS or pantry delivery services. Through our routing system, you visit points of sale only when they need servicing, helping you to cut down on windshield time, service more locations per route, and run a more efficient operation.
Once all your locations, machines, markets, and OCS stations are set up and configured in your system, select a service route you would like to plan.
All service route information will be displayed here, ready to plan according to configuration defaults. This includes the predicted state of all point of sale assets when planning services that are set to happen in the future, and not necessarily the day of planning.
You can see here that the system has already preselected a number of locations to be serviced and sorts them in your preferred order of importance based on sold outs, inventory levels, and potential cash to collect. Again, all these factors are customizable in route settings. As you select different items to service, the summary of this service route will be updated here. This displays the amount of assets being serviced and potential cash to collect.
We understand that every operation is different so we offer a large variety of metrics to consider that can help you determine when it is time to service. For machines and markets utilizing real time sales data, we can show you vital information about them. We can see here many important metrics for both now and the planned day of service. These include items such as amount of sold outs, how long it has been since last service, inventory level percentage, cash to collect, and much more. We can even see the last time an inventory audit has been performed.
For a location’s OCS stations we can take a glance at the orders that have been placed here. Or for managed stations, the current default order of products to be dropped off according to schedule. Once you are satisfied with your selection of assets and locations to service, select calculate route and let Parlevel find the optimal driving route to hit every location in a timely manner.
This route looks good! let’s calculate the prekitting needed for this route. This page displays a summary of all the product that will be prekitted for this route. Clicking here will take you back to this route and show its progress. Throughout the day of service, this page will be updated as your driver moves from location to location. Use the Routes menu to start planning a new route or to jump to any of your ongoing routes to see progress. Now, let’s see how we can take dynamic routing to the next level with our newer “Smart Routing” features and tools.
To start using Smart Routing, first turn on the feature from within Company Settings. With this setting on, we can now access Smart Routing. But before we do that, let’s take a look at the setup for all the new configuration options that make Smart Routing really powerful.
Let’s make our first Planning Tier. Planning tiers allow you to set and prioritize a set of rules. Service routes can then use these rules to better determine exactly which machines and markets should be serviced. Start with the most important metrics you care about and work your way down to setup the perfect set of rules that will ensure all machines and markets are serviced quickly and effectively.
For example, if the most important item to me is to make sure machines are not out there holding too much cash, I’ll set the rule at the highest priority to be to collect greater than $200. Then next, I’ll make sure to take care of any assets that have dropped to an inventory level that is less than 60 percent. Every priority level will support up to two rules and it’s possible to go up to as many as 10 priority levels.
Okay, let’s apply this new Tier to one of our Routes to see it in action. Here’s the new tier we created, let’s apply this and see how it is used in Smart Routing.
When we first arrive in Smart Routing, we’ll see a list of all service routes that are in progress for the selected service day. Let’s click over to Planning to get started planning a new service route. Smart Routing offers all the standard tools of dynamic routing but takes things further by utilizing the new Planning Tiers and the ability to plan multiple service routes in bulk. You may even find yourself planning all your service routes with one click! Routes will be defaulted to their selected planning tier but can also be changed on the fly.” Use this option to see how newly created tiers work with different routes. Let’s plan these and see how they come out!
After planning, you can see a summary of the outcome and quickly finalize to the prekitting step if everything looks good. Or click on the “Details” option to take a look at everything that was planned. Here you will see a familiar set of metrics to standard dynamic routing with some additional filtering options. After any potential adjustments to the selected asset, you can finalize from right on this page or click on “Return to Planning Summary” to take a look at other routes.
Okay, these looks good, let’s finalize everything.
Through Parlevel’s routing system, you service machines, markets, or accounts that truly need it. Start routing with Parlevel today to cut service costs and run a more efficient operation.
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