Overview
A Tour is a set of Stops which is assigned to a driver in order for them to execute it. Tours can consist of stops from Bookings as well as custom stops that are only part of the tour. Tours typically are being route optimized to increase efficiency of the driver. Read more about Tours here.
MotionTools offers multiple options on how Bookings can be rearranged into optimized tours. Building tours is called 'dispatching' and means that one or many Stops of one or many bookings will be dispatched into tours. The relevant bookings will then be moved into dispatched status, if all stops have been dispatched into a tour or partially dispatched status if only some stops have been moved to a tour.
The individual stops are then mirrored in the tour and the tour will be assigned to Drivers, so that they can be executed. If all stops of a dispatched tour have been completed on the tour, the related bookings will be moved to completed as well.
There are multiple ways on how to build a tour and these optimizations can also be undone by canceling a tour. All tour building features can either be used manually via the Dashboard or programmatically via API:
Details
Merging bookings into a tour
A simple way to optimize bookings is by merging all stops from multiple bookings into one tour. This usually makes sense, when the incoming bookings only have a few or even only one stop and are scheduled. Learn more about this feature: Merge with preview.
Instant-merge bookings into tours
Instant-merge is a simplified version of merging tours, that works with 'one click' and without a preview. A user only selects the bookings that should be merged, clicks on the instant-merge algorithm and it is done. Learn more about this feature: Instant merge.
Optimizing routes of tours
No matter how incoming bookings might have been structured or rearranged, there is a good change, that the actual route of the booking or tour is not optimized. This is why MotionTools offers to automatically sort all stops of a tour by certain criteria e.g. to ensure that drivers take the shortest way possible and reduce delivery time and kilometers driven.
