The 21.2 product release adds new functionality to the system and builds on some of the improvements made over the course of 2020. Significant enhancements have also been made to our Planning & Optimisation product, which we are pleased to announce is now available to customers in the Middle East.
A future update to the Web Portal user interface to improve page navigation, the introduction of our Digital Adoption Platform to provide improved self-help guidance for our users on system features, and further enhancements to the Knowledge Portal are also explored within the documentation for this release. An upcoming webinar led by Paul Pounder, our product manager for the Knowledge Portal, will be held to explore these changes in greater depth.
JOURNEY MANAGEMENT
Furthering user’s ability to engage with third party waypoint providers alongside the Web Portal, Journey Management customers can now choose whether to use a third party’s route waypoints to replace the standard Microlise set as of the 21.2 release, removing any risk of inconsistencies where the two sets differ.
Filtering POD/POC outputs for the production of PDFs has now also been updated, adding the capability to restrict the results to collections only. This improves the efficiency of the delivery process by ensuring that only relevant information is displayed to users via delivery notes, reducing the possibility of human error while performing tasks.
EPOD MOBILE APPS
Customers who use our mobile applications will see improvements to the site summary screen, making it more practical for drivers to capture delivery confirmation information through a wider range of customisation options.
The site summary screen is displayed during the course of accepting a customer signature for a delivery. The contents of the screen can now be customised to streamline what information is displayed to customers, limiting it to only what is most useful to them to improve the delivery acceptance experience for end customers.
To allow greater flexibility for customers to meet changing stock level demands across different sites, drivers can now also use the SmartPOD app to record instances of adding or removing stock from their vehicle whilst out on their journeys. Drivers are presented with a record of these stock changes at the end of their journey, which is available to print, making it easy to maintain and audit records of stock movement on vehicles over time.
PLANNING & OPTIMISATION
Our Planning & Optimisation product has also seen multiple updates with the 21.2 release.
To save users time while putting together their optimised plans, unassigned order information is now displayed consistently between both the timeline and map views in the unassigned orders bucket, which collects the orders that the optimiser could not automatically assign into one place and makes them visible for users to decide the best course of action for them manually.
Established plans can now also be re-optimised, allowing users to further improve on a already optimised plan that they have manually edited via the timeline. Doing so will maintain the original set of resources assigned (i.e. drivers, vehicles), and users can choose whether to re-optimise both a single route or multiple routes depending on their needs, speeding up the overall planning process.
To help reduce the time constraints involved and simplify the process of maintaining and importing the driver master data file (used to feed driver information into the optimisation tool) it is now possible to modify and then import or delete driver records as a single record or in a batch without having to import the whole file. Users will also now see a summary of their changes after each successful upload of the driver master data file.
