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MapInfo Monday: Assign Areas til Service Engineers

  • 1.  MapInfo Monday: Assign Areas til Service Engineers

    Employee
    Posted 2 hours ago

    A few weeks back, we had a call with a customer of ours. 

    They send out service technicians to fix your appliances. They use drivetime regions to determine which technician should cover a specific area.

    Let me give you an example.

    Happy #MapInfoMonday!

    Drivetime Regions

    Let's start with a map of service technicians in the southwest of the United Kingdom. Please note that these are not the locations of Beko's technicians. These are just some locations that I have picked to write this article.

    I'll also note that there is more to this kind of work than just selecting the nearest technician.

    image
    For these locations, we can create drivetime regions. In this example, I have chosen to create 15-, 30-, and 45-minute drivetime regions. For your specific use case, the distances may be higher or lower.
    On the initial page of the Drivetime Regions window, you select your input table and specify the output table as well. You also select a column containing a unique name or ID for your locations, and finally, you specify the size of the drivetime regions. The size can be specified in time for drivetime regions or in distance for drive distance regions.
    You can create up to 3 regions per location at a time.
    image
    If you move to More Options, you can adjust some settings for your regions.
    In my example, I change the Complexity to return less complex polygons. The smaller this value, the less complex the polygons.
    I also select a few more columns from the technician table to bring them across to the driveregion table.
    image
    Now I can let the process run. I create the drivetime regions for all my locations. You can also create drivetime regions for a single location at a time by selecting the location and using the selection instead of the full table.
    You can see that the Drivetime Region process is running in the Tasks window. You can continue using MapInfo Pro while this process runs.
    image
    When the process finishes, you will end up with a map like this.
    image
    I prefer to add a thematic map to the drivetime regions - an individual thematic map based on the values (minutes in this case). This makes it easier to turn on and off the drivetime regions for specific times using the Layer list.
    The darker the color, the shorter the technicians' travel time.
    image
    When you add and remove technicians to and from your team, you may want to change the service district. This can also happen when one area gets busier.
    You may find yourself looking at the map, wondering which of the three nearest technicians should cover the area in the middle where the mouse is positioned. That area appears to be at a similar distance from all three locations.
    image
    It may be similar in straight-line distance, but drivetime regions can reveal that it's faster to drive to this area from one location than from the other two.
    When you turn on the drivetime regions, one drivetime distance at a time, it becomes clear that it's faster to drive to this location from Exeter than from the other two. Exeter can get to this location in less than 30 minutes. The other two would take in 30-45 minutes.
    image
    I hope this gave you some ideas - and maybe a new way to think about "closests".
    In an upcoming article, I'll show how you can assign areas to a technician based on the nearest technician - again using drivetime regions.
    Thanks to the Beko team for sharing their use case.


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    Peter Horsbøll Møller
    Principal Presales Consultant | Distinguished Engineer
    Precisely | Trust in Data
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