Planning the Week Ahead

Building today's route keeps operations running. Planning the full week keeps you from scrambling when a call-in arrives midweek.

Create draft routes for each day

At the start of the week, create a Draft route for each day the truck runs. You don't need to finalize every route — just place stops by territory so you know roughly where the driver will be on each day.

A practical approach:

• Monday: Finalize fully — committed route with stops locked, optimized, and published
• Tuesday–Friday: Draft only — place stops by territory direction (north, east, west, south) without optimizing yet

When a call-in comes in on Wednesday, you already know which territory the driver is working. Drop the new stop onto the appropriate day's draft instead of scrambling to reroute.

Use overdues as planned check-ins

When your location first loads into Route Simplified, the map may show many overdue generators (maroon pins). Most of these are not service emergencies — they're generators that don't yet have reliable capacity and fill rate data, so the system is projecting past-due dates based on incomplete information.

Don't ignore them, but don't panic either. Work through them systematically:

• Add two or three overdues to each day's route as check-in stops
• At the stop, the driver verifies what's actually in the tank and updates capacity or fill rate

Over a few weeks, the overdue list shrinks and the data becomes accurate

A different approach: the single Priorities Route

Planning the full week ahead isn't the only way to work. Some schedulers prefer to keep one Priorities Route that holds every stop coming due soon, optimize that single route, and then split it into the day-by-day routes that actually get published. With this approach you only plan one day forward at a time, and the Priorities Route acts as a running backlog you draw from.

• Build and optimize one Priorities Route containing every stop that's coming due, overdue, or has a pending call-in
• Each day, pull the next batch of stops off the Priorities Route into that day's actual route
• Optimize and publish just that one day's route
• Repeat the next day, continuing to draw from the same Priorities Route

Both strategies are viable — planning the full week ahead keeps you further out in front of surprises, while working from a single Priorities Route keeps things simpler when your day-to-day changes a lot. Try both and use whichever fits how your team actually works.