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.