In the Maxoptra System the customer locations window is used to hold the locations which belong to the clients of a transportation company. This can be a store, a point of sale, a warehouse or any other type of location. Multiple customer locations can be associated with the same client.
Customer locations can be created both manually within the system, as described below, and by importing them into the system. When importing, multiple customer locations are created within the system automatically.
For more information about importing, see Importing orders.
Such parameters of a customer location such as "Time of operations", "Preferred drivers" and "Vehicle requirements" affect the automatic planning. For example, specified drivers will receive orders for a specific customer location and the scheduling drop off time should be within the operations time of the customer location. Or, for example, a vehicle equipped with a tail lift to unload the goods will be planned for a customer location that does not have a loading dock.
Note: During manual planning these rules can be ignored.
To create a new customer location:
1. Ensure Account Administrator is selected under ‘Role’.
2. Open the ‘Settings’ screen.
3. Highlight ‘Customer locations’.
4. On the bottom toolbar of this screen, click ‘Add’ and the following screen should now appear:
Figure 1 – Creating customer location
5. At ‘Name’ type the name of the customer location.
6. At ‘Address’ you can specify the address of the customer location by doing one of the following:
- Start typing the address in the field marked ‘Address’. The addresses will be suggested automatically.
- Alternatively, using the map, click Search on map button. This will bring up a separate screen displaying a map then click the appropriate point on the map.
7. If necessary, at the ‘Preferred drivers’ dropdown list, select one or more drivers preferred to deliver orders to this customer location.
8. On the right side of the screen where it reads ’Time of operations’, if necessary, specify the ‘from’ and ‘to’ time for each day of the week when the customer location will be ready to deal with the order drop offs.
Note: A blank field denotes that any time is acceptable.
For more information about required and optional parameters of customer locations, see Customer location parameters.
9. If necessary, specify other (optional) parameters of the customer location.
10. Click ‘Save’. This will close the form. To create a new customer location click 'Add' and follow the above mentioned steps.