Route Planning is an Add-On in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, developed by Intech. It helps you plan your appointments on map by analyzing the Dynamics CRM data and plotting it across the routes.
Route Planning has been enhanced with dynamic filters. Dynamic filters help you select a specific account which we want to see in route planning. This filter will help you in saving much of your time by giving you optimized routes of selected accounts.
For example, it’s not possible to visit all the companies situated in Ahmedabad in a day. So, you can select a specific area for visits. Here’s when dynamics filter of Route Planning in Dynamics 365 for Sales comes to your rescue.
Steps to be followed:
Let us start with account/customer. For route planning, it is mandatory for an account to have latitude and longitude of the located address.
We have added territory field in account form as we have configured territory filter in route planning map. Here, Ahmedabad is the territory.
Click on route planning and you’ll see the territories available in Dynamics 365 for Sales.
Click on the territory (here, Ahmedabad) and now map is blank because user have to select Ahmedabad territory area from account sub grid.
Here, you’ll see a sub grid of accounts. You can select an account which you want to add in Route Planning. Now, you will see only the filtered accounts of specific territory. Click on the associated sub grid button located on the right side of account sub grid.
Click ‘Add existing account’ button. You will then see the accounts with Ahmedabad territory. It is a custom account filtered view. So, you can select any territory and you will get the accounts based in that territory only.
You will see a filtered account view. Here, we have selected Ahmedabad as a territory so only the accounts in Ahmedabad territory will show up.
Then allow Dynamics CRM to access you location.
Once you allow access to your location, you will get optimized routes and distances to all the areas of the selected territory from your location. It will automatically optimize the route for the appropriate customer of the selected territory’s latitude and longitude recorded on Customer Card.
Optimized route means nearest location from your current location.
You can see the address of customer in white box by clicking on Google Marker Pin.
You will also see a table, which shows Route location information. It is directly mapped with CRM customer. In this table,
- A: Current location of sales person (Current User of CRM).
- B: Nearest location from Current User’s Location i.e. A.
- C: Nearest location from location B.
- F: The destination of route planning which is marked as red color in map.
Want to know more about Route Planning and its dynamic filters? Let’s get in touch.