The first one I'll be talking about is auto what we call auto update booking travel
time this is nothing new it's already existed in the old schedule board.
And what we've done as part of early access of Wave 1 2021 is to bring it
to the new schedule board what auto update booking travel time does
is that it goes to Bing maps and collects and calculates a travel time uh for a
booking so whenever you're doing a manual booking let's just do one now
You will notice that a travel time is calculated this is calculated by going to
Bing maps and uh you can see it appears as a travel line
and if you move around
so because
You'll notice that it's different uh it was 35
now it's 41 because Carrie and John are actually in different locations
so it is actually calculating that uh the way to set up auto update travel time is to
go into settings and scheduling parameters and you'll see
this field and you just have to mark it as enabled.
One thing that auto update booking travel time does not do is that if you kind of
change the time of day the the travel time stays the same. So it was always 41 and
then over here it's just going to stay uh for Carrie it was 35 and that's because
it's a happy path travel time it's not taking into account things like rush hours
and if you want historical traffic to be taken into account we have a feature
known as Predictive travel. Predictive travel was released
last year um it's available only to Resource Scheduling Optimization
customers as you have to buy that add-in for Field Service but once you do have it
then you can use it for optimizations that are running non-interactively that is
through like running schedules and publishing them in batch mode uh let's just
quickly jump to how that one is set so if you're in the
Resource Scheduling Optimization app and you go to optimization goals
then you can open up a goal and you will set Bing maps with historical traffic to
uh include to have Predictive travel turned on and the next thing you
do is you use this goal in an optimization schedule so here I've got an optimization
schedule open you'll notice it's using the gold that had traffic on and once you run
the schedule then it's going to use predictive travel when it's calculating
routes and it'll factor in traffic um and it'll adjust the routes accordingly so the
routes are optimized taking into account time dependent travel times time
of day depend on travel time so let's just um since this can take a while to run
I've already pre-run it let's just take a look at what the results were so
here you see a schedule that was produced entirely through an RSO run and
you will notice these blue dots on the travel indicators these indicate that
the travel time is more accurate because it used predictive travel and if
the travel line is too short the dot could have been truncated but you can
also hover on the booking and you will see it here uh this um it's also going
to be a field on booking so if you want to do an analysis of how many
bookings use predictive travel uh you can do that and you can you do use
that to help refine the way you set up scopes uh because predictive travel can
take longer you might want to use it more for urban areas not so much for
you know if rural areas don't have that much traffic maybe you decide to skip
it there but you can accordingly adjust your scopes um and the legend also
explains that the blue dot means that the travel time includes historical traffic
and we hope this feature can lead to more accurate schedules so your technician
is not missing appointments due to traffic and
therefore improving your end customer satisfaction.