Cross-order Routing

A new Digital Waybill feature, cross-order routing, expands on the dispatcher sorting described in the previous post and allows you to use our routing capabilities to plan your drivers' daily schedules. Cross-order routing can be helpful in many situations, but we hope our overnight couriers will find this feature especially useful. To get started, enable dispatcher sorting.

Once you've turned this on, select a driver from the left pane of the main dispatch window. This will show all of that driver's active orders in the center part of the window. Now, right-click anywhere in that window and you'll see two options at the bottom: Optimize Pickup Addresses and Optimize Delivery Addresses. Pick the appropriate option, enter in a starting address and an ending address, and click Optimize. Digital Waybill will show you a map of the suggested Google Maps route, and you can accept or decline their suggestion. If you accept, the driver's orders will be rearranged and display in the new order in his 2-Way.

Note: the cross-order routing works either with pickup addresses or delivery addresses, and will only consider those addresses when it creates the route.

Dispatcher Sorting

Dispatcher sorting is a new feature that allows you to manually arrange orders for your drivers. It's a precursor to the automatic cross-order routing feature, which we'll discuss in the next post. Say you have 10 orders assigned to one driver, and you know that if they handle them in a certain order, it will make their driving route faster and more efficient; with dispatcher sorting, you can manually rearrange the jobs so the driver will see them in this order.

First, a couple important notes about dispatcher sorting. It will only work if your drivers are using the 2-Way. With the regular text/e-mail dispatches, they simply arrive in the order you send them. Also, turning on dispatcher sorting will disable regular sorting by category. Normally, when you click the header for a column on the dispatch screen (order number, status, ready time etc.), it sorts the order by that category. Dispatcher sorting means that you can only sort the orders manually, and not by category. Of course, keep in mind that you can always switch back and forth between these modes.

Turn on dispatcher sorting by going to Settings -> Delivery Services and checking the Dispatcher Sorting box in the lower right corner. Next, click on a driver on the left side of the main dispatch screen to show that driver's orders in the window. You can now drag and drop the orders to rearrange them, and the new order will be reflected in the driver's 2-Way app.

Customizing Export Spreadsheets

You may have noticed in the past few months that we've made a number of improvements to Digital Waybill. We've added bugfixes, stability improvements and interface enhancements, as well as completely new features. We'll be catching you up on how to use these features in this blog over the next few weeks, but today we'd like to start with something basic: customizing your exported spreadsheets.

If you're unfamiliar with exporting orders from your Completed Orders screen, it's a feature that lets you dump all your order information into a spreadsheet. They may not be as nicely formatted as our invoices and sales reports, but they do let you filter your order list by any different criteria, and they also include every last detail of an order, including information not found anywhere else.

This huge collection of order information is useful for record keeping and analysis, but it's not so useful for printing, at least at the default settings. If you'd like to pare down the spreadsheet so only the most important fields show up on the document, follow these steps:

Go to Settings > Delivery Services and click the Customize Export button. From here, you can select which fields will be exported. This way, you can eliminate columns and create a more readable, printable document.

*Note: The first 'Distance' field is the distance in meters, and the second one (which is the last column on the sheet) is distance in miles.

Technical Support & Remote Assistance

The best way to contact us about a technical problem is to send an e-mail to support@digitalwaybill.com with a detailed description of your and your contact information (phone number and availability, if you prefer to be contacted by phone. You can also call us at any time at (800).575.3510. If no one is available to take your call immediately, leave a message and we'll return your call as soon as possible.

Our support agents will frequently use Remote Assistance to troubleshoot the problem, which allows them to take control of your system and perform the necessary troubleshooting steps. This can be accessed through 'Remote Assistance' from the 'Discover' menu within the program, or you can navigate to www.dwlogin.com from your web browser. Remote Assistance is our default remote desktop tool, but we can also create a Screen Connect session for you if the the first method doesn't work. Of course, our support agents will walk you through this process if necessary.

Setting Up Digital Waybill on Multiple Machines

Your main Order Panel is designed to be installed on one computer and left there; you really don't want to have the main panel installed on more than one machine at a time. However, Digital Waybill offers a few options for using the system on more than one computer. Some of them are designed for portability for a single user, and others are designed to allow multiple dispatchers at once. We'll outline the various options below.

If you've installed Digital Waybill on one computer and want to be able to access it remotely, we recommend third party remote desktop software called LogMeIn Free. There are a number of free remote desktop solutions out there, and you can pick the one you're most comfortable with, but LogMeIn is simple and easy to set up and works through any full-featured browser. A common use for LogMeIn is to access your office computer from home, or from another location when you're out of the office. To set it up, go to www.logmein.com and select LogMeIn Free from the products menu. You'll need to register for an account and install a small program on your main computer. Once this is done, you'll be able to securely access and take control of your main computer from any other computer with internet access. This type of remote desktop software will give you full access to the slave computer, not just Digital Waybill. However, only one person will be able to control the computer at any given time.

LogMeIn is really designed for remote access for a single user. For multiple simultaneous users, we've integrated some helpful features into Digital Waybill to allow for this. You can set up as many Order Entry Screens as you'd like. This is designed for offices who have call takers (employees who are taking calls and entering orders), but don't need any dispatching or other functionality. Basically what they'll see on these Order Entry Screens is the same window that pops up when you click 'Enter New' in your order panel. However, they won't be able to do anything else from the secondary computers.

If you need full-fledged simultaneous dispatching, give us a call to set you up with a Remote Panel. This requires an additional license, but allows for complete dispatch panels to be set up simultaneously on other computers. These Remote Panels have two limitations: they can't access the accounting functions via the 'Invoices' button, and they won't be able to edit prices or other settings in the 'Settings' window. These two functions can only be accessed through the main panel. Remote dispatchers will be able to access customers and driver lists, if you choose to allow that.

Zone Sets & Zone Pricing

Zone pricing allows you to create a flexible pricing table using customized zones. Your first step is to create a zone set; this zone set will contain all of your zones, and usually includes your entire service area. Each zone in the zone set will be assigned their own rates in the pricing table. A typical pricing table will include all the possible combinations (e.g. Zone A to Zone B, Zone A to Zone C, and Zone B to Zone C), but you can confine a price list to only show rates going to and from a single zone. Click on the zone set on the left, and select 'Add Zone' to name your zone.

Next, you'll need to define each zone by adding cities, postal codes, or even specific companies. Digital Waybill matches zones as specifically as possible, by checking company first, then postal code, then city. So if an address matches its company name in one zone but its city in another, it will be assigned to the zone with the matching company name. Once the pickup and delivery addresses have been assigned to zones, the base price will be determined by pulling the corresponding value from the table.

You can create a price table with all of your zones by adding a 'Zone Based' price list, and choosing the relevant zone set. If you'd like to confine your price list to only one zone (that is, all the orders will have an address in that zone as either the pickup or delivery address), you can select the 'Single Zone' option and select your base zone from the drop-down menu. From there, it's simply a matter of filling in all the rates per zone and service type.

The Mobile App for Customer Ordering

You might have noticed that the 'Mobile App' has been enabled as a feature on your order panel. This allows your customers to place orders with you directly from your Android or Apple device. The first step in setting customers up with mobile ordering is to install the Quick Entry ordering client on their machines.

From here, have the customer click the Android icon in the bottom left, which will prompt them for an e-mail address to send login credentials. The app can then be downloaded from the Android Marketplace or the Apple App Store (pending Apple's approval, which will hopefully occur in the upcoming few weeks), and after logging in using the e-mailed information, your customers will be able to place apps from their phone.