Setting up Geocoding for Technician Starting Locations

Geocoding technician starting locations

Setting up geocoding for a technician location adds the latitude and longitude coordinates to their starting address record, which is used by the Routing process in the Schedule Map. Technician Location addresses are set up in Administration Setup on the Resource Options tab. The technician location is their starting location for the day, which could be at their home or a work location. The geocoding process will determine the latitude and longitude of the technician's address and this information is used to position their vehicle on the Schedule map during the Routing process. See Setting Up Resource Options for more information. Technicians can be assigned to a specific vehicle in Signature. See Setting Up Vehicles for more information.

The Geocoding process is paginated as some users may have hundreds of technicians. The lower left corner provides the option to display 20, 50, or 100 results on the page. The lower right corner displays "Page 1 of x (x items)" at the lower right corner along with the page numbers. The selected page number is highlighted. Geocoding only processes the current page. For example, if you have 500 technicians and you've set the system to display 100 results, you will have five pages of technicians. If you select the Mark All checkbox, you are only selecting the 100 technicians on the currently displayed page. You will need to process each page separately to complete the geocoding process on all technician starting locations.

The Mapping API that is set up in Schedule Settings is used to obtain the coordinates. If you do not have a Bing or Google API key, you will be limited to 2500 records per day. If you select to display all technician starting locations (by marking All Addresses) and you elect to fetch coordinates for a starting location where the geocode already exists, that location will be reprocessed and the latitude/longitude values will be rewritten in the location table even if the coordinates did not change.

To obtain technician starting locations:

1. In Schedule, select the menu icon.

2. Select Geocoding.
3. From the Entity drop-down, select Technicians. 
4. To display only the technicians that currently do not have coordinates assigned to their starting location, leave All Addresses? set to Off. To display all technicians, including those with coordinates already assigned, toggle All Addresses? to On. 
5. Select Fetch Address to display the Technician Locations. 
6. The following columns display:
   • Technician Name
     Displays the technician's long name.
   • Address/City/State/Postal Code
     Displays the address that was entered in the Resource Options setting window. 
   • Latitude/Longitude
     Displays existing latitude and longitude values, if the location has previously been processed for geocoding.
   • Result
     This column displays information after Fetch Coordinates is run. 
     • Success displays for successfully obtaining the coordinates.
     • If there is an issue with obtaining the coordinates, the actual error message displays from the mapping system that you have set up (Google Maps or Bing Maps).
7. Mark the checkbox(es) to the left of the technicians that you want to fetch the coordinates for. You can mark/unmark all checkboxes on the current page by marking the checkbox in the header section to the right of Technician Name.
8. Select Fetch Coordinates.

9. To save the latitude and longitude coordinates to the technician starting location record(s), select Update Coordinates. 

   
   

Resetting resource starting locations

In order to reset the technician’s vehicle location to the same starting point each day for routing purposes, at the beginning of the work day, the dispatcher can reset all technicans to their starting home location. The technician starting locations are set up on the Resource Options tab in Administration Setup. See Setting Up Resource Options for more information.

To obtain technician starting locations:

1. In Schedule, select the menu icon.

2. Select Geocoding.
3. On the far left side of the window, select Reset Resource Locations.

Filtering, sorting, and rearranging data

Use your mouse to drag or select options below:

• Group
  To group the display by a column, select a column header and drag this to the area labeled Drag a column header to the group location to group the results by that column located to the top left of the columns. To undo the grouping, drag the column header back to anywhere on the grid, the column header returns automatically to its original location.

• Sort order
  Select the column header to change the sort order. A small triangle points to indicate if the sorting is ascending (A-Z) or descending (Z-A). Hold the Shift key when selecting headers to sort against multiple columns simultaneously.

• Filter
  Select the lookup to select a filter type (contains, does not contain, starts with, ends with, equals, does not equal) and enter the value in the field to the right of the lookup. To clear the filters, select the Clear Filter icon located in the in the top right corner.
• Column Order
  Drag the column headers to the left or right to change the column order. The Customer and Location columns each have a main column header that lets you drag all three columns (Notes, Name, ID) at the same time. You can also rearrange the Notes, Name, and ID columns beneath both the Customer and Location headers.
• Scrolling
  A horizontal scrollbar is hidden until you hover with your mouse at the bottom of the grid. When the horizontal scrollbar displays, you can drag the bar to view more columns. A vertical scrollbar is automatically displayed.

Exporting data

You have the option to export all data or specific rows to an Excel file. Exporting location addresses from the geocoding window is useful however this is most useful when the geocoding API returns error information that makes it impossible to successfully geocode a location address. By exporting these locations, you will have a working list of location records to be corrected to resolve “bad” or missing address information.

It is important to note that:

• If you select Export all data, this is ALL records, not just the displayed page of records. If you have 20,000 records and select to export all, they will all be included in the Excel file.
• To export only the displayed page of records, select the Mark All checkbox in the header section. This only marks the records on the current page. Then select Export select rows.
• You can also mark specific rows on multiple pages and export only those rows.

To export the data:

1. In Schedule, select the menu icon.

2. Select Geocoding.
3. On the far left side of the window, select the Export icon.

4. From the menu, select either Export all data or Export select rows.

5. Select the download location and then select Save.