MasterRouter Features

Features

MasterRouter has a rich set of features to handle all kinds of real-world constraints

Stand-Alone or Integrated Modes

MasterRouter is a flexible system that allows for both enterprise-level integration with ERP/CRM systems for extensive planning and task assignment, as well as strategic and tactical planning for assessing theoretical scenarios and changes to your scenarios. Regardless of your requirements, MasterRouter revolves around your entire sales and service operations.

Stand-Alone Mode

Strategic and tactical scenarios can be run in this mode to answer questions such as:

How many extra resources will I need if I add 20 minutes to each customer call?
What will the impact be of visiting customers twice instead of three times per week?
Where would be the best place to hire a new resource?
If I kept the customer visit days fixed, could I re-assign the customers to resources more effectively?
Would allowing my staff to sleep-out enable me to service my customers better?

Integrated Mode

In this mode, master data is updated via the ERP/CRM (with custom middleware or CSV/XML export) before the assignment of tasks to resources and days is generated by MasterRouter. The scheduled activities can then be published to the calendar interface to map the multi-day plan to actual dates. The sequenced daily tasks allocated to each resource can then be sent to staff via mobile devices.

Visit Profiles

Contractual service obligations with your customers are captured as profiles. A profile is a set of permissible service days and can be of any duration, typically from a week to two months. Each customer can have multiple profile options from which MasterRouter will choose the most appropriate in conjunction with the other customer and resource requirements.

Route From Your Home, Your Office, or Depot

Daily routing is done from the reps’ homes, a central site or from the sleep-out location.

Lunch Breaks and Team Meetings

Allowance for daily lunch breaks and regular meetings can be included in the planning.

Territory Cutting

Territory cutting is used to generate service territories, based on geographical location, to balance workload against distance within the territories.

Site / Site & Site / Resource Exclusions

To prevent certain customer types from being seen by the same resource or to ensure customers in different channels/tiers are seen by a rep with the correct skills, inclusions and exclusions can be configured.

Preferred Visit Days and Resources

The assignment of visit days and resources to customers can be pre-assigned, preferred or left to MasterRouter to decide. The preference setting allows for reduced disturbance to existing operations by maintaining some consistency in the assignments.

Determine Resource Locations

Find the best location for resources, taking into account customer density and workload, while planning your master routes.

Sleep Outs

Detailed modeling of on-route sleep-outs including limits on the total number of sleep-outs in a period, the maximum consecutive number and permitted sleep-out days. A sleep-out cost is used to determine when it is cost effective to stay out at the end of a day’s work.

Multi-Criteria Optimization

Reducing costs may not be your only goal, so workload balance and other objectives can be specified with different importance weights.

GIS Visualization / Interaction

Create sets of customers using different criteria and plot these using customized icons. Overlay these sets with colored polygons for easier reference and generate additional polygons by selecting groups of points directly on the map. Driving distance polygons from a fixed location can also be produced.

Charting

Use data summary grids to generate various charts and graphs. MasterRouter includes the ability to slice against any chart axis, dynamically update charts and compare them side-by-side.

Calendar Management

Calendar Management, using Microsoft’s familiar calendar interface, allows you to apply the visit profiles to an actual month or week, with visit days and routes assigned automatically to sales reps. Users can then publish the plan, sending out the daily assignments to their staff via mobile devices and allowing for automatic updates when manually adjusting the plan.

Heat-Map Functionality

Represent customer information by intensity and add more fields via data tags and cross-product fields.

Geocoder

Use our Geocoding app to turn your addresses into geocoded longitudes and latitudes

Our Approach

Below is an example of a common engagement model for a large enterprise (more than 100,000 outlets).
If you are a smaller business, we have a team of consultants that can do the planning on your behalf as a managed service.

Contact us for more information on how our managed service works.

The proof is in the pudding, right?

We believe in our product and are happy to run a MasterRouter study for one of your regions at low cost. All you would need to do is provide us with data for one of your regions, we’ll run a single iteration through MasterRouter and provide you with the results!

After the proof of concept is finished and you’re satisfied, we can expand the engagement to additional regions.

We will do the pre-planning on your behalf for up to 10 regions.

Just send us your data and, in cooperation with you, we’ll run all of the information through MasterRouter and provide you with the results – easy and worthwhile

You Plan In-House Without Integrations

Once you’re happy with the expanded data set up to 10 regions, we’ll provide you with your own MasterRouter license.

We’ll train your own MasterRouter user(s) who will be able manually extract data from your internal systems and input to MasterRouter.

Internal Use – Integrated

Once you’re fully satisfied that MasterRouter is going to be indespensible to your strategy, tactics and operations, we’ll build the pull and push integration into your back-end systems. Your own MasterRouter user(s) will simply run the system at your required frequency (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc) for all of your regions.

Have MasterRouter Plan Automatically at Your Required Frequency

Through the use of the comprehensive MasterRouter API, the data is automatically pushed and pulled at the required frequencies.

All of your pre-planning is done automatically!

Contact us to learn more

“I am happy to recommend MasterRouter, both in terms of the depth and capability of their software as well as the responsiveness and willingness of the team to assist.”

Andre Smit, Solutions Lead – DHL

"Beat delivery optimization has helped us structure our delivery routes, minimizing the manpower and resources required in delivering to 15% more outlets, with 10% lesser cost"

Mayank Pandey, Sales Capability Head – Perfetti

Contact Us

USA: +1 (608) 554-0073
S. Africa: +27-11-880-7951
info@masterrouter.com

USEFUL LINKS