Editing Visit Plans 

Use

You use the Visit Planning functions to edit new or existing visit plans.

You use visit plans to plan customer visits and deliveries that recur periodically as part of the logistics process. From a worklist, you choose customers with certain common criteria (general data on visit plan type), which you then add to a visit plan. You also edit the itinerary for visit plans. The driver specified in the visit plan visits or makes deliveries to the customers assigned to the visit plan on a route.

Features

The following functions are available for editing visit plans:

·        Create visit plans

·        Maintain visit plans

·        Display visit plans

Activities

In the general data for the visit plan you specify:

·        The validity of the visit plan

·        How frequently the visit plan is carried out (once a week on Tuesdays, for example)

·        The visit plan type

·        Which vehicle is assigned to the visit plan

·        Which driver is assigned to the visit plan

At customer level in the visit plan, you can display the goods receiving hours or visit times as stored in the customer master data.

In Customizing for Visit Control, you specify which master data source you want the Visit Control function to reference for data on goods receiving hours and visit times. You specify the source for each visit plan type. The sources can either be the goods receiving times for the unloading point or the visit times of the relevant contact person.

You can also maintain non-appointments for each customer. Non-appointments are a subset of the rule object for the visit plan and describe specific dates on which the customer should not be visited or receive deliveries. You can also flag a customer as inactive. If there is a non-appointment or an inactive indicator for a customer, Visit Control makes sure the customer does not receive any deliveries by not including him or her in the visit lists.

If you have installed a third-party map and geocoded your customer address data, you can display the customers contained in a visit plan on the map.

The system uses symbols to represent customers and connects these symbols with a line, according to their sequence in the visit plan. If you want the visit plan to be shown along with the relevant customers on the map, choose Update GIS.

Based on the visit pan, the system creates the visit list, which you can use for your day-to-day work.

When modified visit plans are saved, Visit Control checks whether there are already visit lists containing future visits or deliveries for the modified visit plans. Visit lists that have already been created are listed for information in a dialog box. You can cancel the procedure for saving the visit plans in the dialog box. Visit Control does not automatically copy changes that are made to the visit plans to existing visit lists.