How can recipients schedule a delivery?

The planning (or scheduling) feature allows you to organize workload and resources in advance, by having a clear view of the deliveries you need to perform in the next days or weeks.
Besides the operational advantage, it enhances the customer experience you offer to your customers.

ℹ️  First things first, an Admin has to tick the "Planning" toggle in the user platform to allow the use of planning/scheduling (Admin->Admin->Switches).

Overview:

1. When to use it?
2. How does planning work?
3. Setup
4. How does the recipient use Planning?

1. When to use it?

You can use the planning feature when you want to make your deliveries more efficient and convenient by:

• providing recipients with a range of delivery times they can choose from
• grouping your daily deliveries to a certain geographical area (e.i. North) or on a certain day of the week (e.i. Monday)
• block certain dates, such as holidays, from preventing users to book takes on specific days

2. How does planning work?

Scheduling tasks is done with the help of time slots.
Time slots are intervals of time set up by you, in which the recipients can choose to be delivered. 
Each time slot can be matched with a certain range of zip codes or zones, to increase operational efficiency.
The optimization will make sure that rounds are created based on this information.

3. Setup

Before being able to use the scheduling feature, you need to create a specific flow activating the Planning option as shown on the screenshot:

Configure the flow as usual and make sure to define the specific properties related to Planning.
The first configuration concerns the number of days needed to plan tasks in advance (min. to max.)
Then multiple properties can be selected:

• Allow flexible time windows : once activated, the client can select a personalized time slot. The delivery will be assigned to the closest matching time slot you defined (read below). If the time window doesn’t match at all a time slot, then it will be rejected. 
• Ignore capacity constraints in time slots : capacity restrictions (number of tasks, weight, etc.) will be ignored and the time slot will be overloaded. You can, for example, use this option to prioritize deliveries for a certain Sender. Always use this option with caution.
• Limit the number of bookings allowed : if this option is activated, the tracking page informs the recipient about how many times deliveries can be replanned. If activated, you need to define the maximum number of replans allowed.
• Block when there are less than x days until the planned delivery : If activated, the tracking page informs the recipient until when they can replan
• Do not allow to select time slots that reached the cutoff time : If activated, it will only be possible for the recipient to reserve a time slot before the cutoff time set for that specific time slot

Then, you will need to define the fleet:

Afterward, you will need to define the time slots, After clicking on 'Add Time slot', you will be able to define a specific time slot with the parameters you see below:

And then, you can set the number of 'Max number of tasks'. This information will be used to calculate when your vehicle can effectively deliver each order.

❗Only vehicles with defined 'Max number of tasks' will be considered for the timeslot you specify.

• Start-End: the time window in which you're planning the delivery
• Cutoff time: the amount of time, before the start time of the defined time window, for which this timeslot will still be available for selection 
• Weekdays: the weekdays on which this delivery slot will be available
• Authorized postal codes: only the postcodes inserted here will be considered for this timeslot
• Authorized zones: only the zones defined here will be considered for this timeslot
• Select a vehicle: the vehicles will appear only if you added them beforehand in fleet
• Count: the number of vehicles you want to allocate
• Max number of tasks: Maximum tasks allowed in a timeslot period.

❗Please be aware that any labels on your items that restrict the type of vehicle used will impact the availability of your timeslots. 

For example: If a task that needs to be scheduled has a label for refrigeration, the recipient will only be able to select timeslots that have a vehicle with the same label assigned to them.

4. How does the recipient use Planning?

Recipients will be notified that their delivery can be planned. The notification will contain the link to the page where timeslots can be chosen.

The first day with timeslots available will be pre-selected. Recipients will see several options and will be asked to confirm their choice of a delivery timeslot. 

If later on, the recipient wishes to change the delivery timeslot, it will be possible on the exact same page, taking into account the time restrictions you set up in your flow.

Note: To discover how to personalize your tracking page, you can read this article.
For customizing your platform branding, take a look at this article.