Overview
A key part of dispatching is to ensure that the right drivers will be assigned to tours. One way to do that is to set preferred drivers on a tour. In short, setting preferred drivers, limits the visibility of a tour to the selected drivers additionally to other criteria that may apply.
This article explains what the feature "preferred drivers" is and how to use it:
What happens before assigning
Overview of assigning features
Manually setting preferred drivers
Automating assigning
Pre-assigning before tour creation
Details
What happens before assigning
As part of the typical dispatching workflow, a dispatcher would usually first create a tour out of an incoming booking, before assigning it to a driver. Even if the booking should initially be done "as is" and no optimization applies, we recommend converting an incoming booking to a tour. This means that there will be more flexibility for a dispatcher later to change things, e.g. add return stops or merge with another booking later.
Overview of assigning features
We recommend reading the other articles in the dispatch tools section to learn more about tour building and other options of assigning besides preferred drivers. There are also other things that influence the visibility of a tour towards a driver, which are important to understand.
Manually setting preferred drivers
Click on Operations in the menu
Find the Tour that you want to set preferred drivers on and hover over it or click to expand
Find the Select driver button and click on it
View all available drivers in the same service area or adjust the check-boxes to see more drivers
Select one or multiple drivers
Click Save to save the selection without changing the status of the Tour
Automating assigning
Besides setting preferred drivers as a dispatcher in the operations page, it is also possible to run these actions completely automatically, utilizing the MotionTools API. Please send us a support ticket if you want to learn more or browse through the developer resources.
Pre-assigning before tour creation
Besides adding preferred drivers to a tour, it's also possible to already pre-assign bookings to drivers. There are two main benefits
1) Managers of partner organizations will be able to see such bookings and can build their own tours with them
2) If the booking is converted into a tour later, the preferred driver will (under certain conditions) be added to that tour automatically