Editing stop details and moving a stop in Route by Zaweba

Every stop in a round has a dialog of its own, and you open it by double-clicking the stop. It is a small window, but it holds nearly everything Route by Zaweba knows about that visit: its number in the round, its name, its address, any notes, how long you will spend there, the time window you need to arrive in, and its position as a latitude and longitude.

Most of the time you add stops quickly, by searching, right-clicking the map or importing a CSV file, and the dialog is where you go back and tidy them up. A stop that came in from a spreadsheet as a bare postcode can be given a proper name. A customer who has asked you to arrive after ten can be given a window. A visit that always takes longer than you expect can be given a realistic time at stop.

What each field is for

The number shows where the stop sits in the current order. It changes when you optimise or reverse the round, so treat it as a position rather than a permanent label.

The name and address are what you and anyone reading your route sheet will recognise. Keep names short and plain, such as a surname or a business name, because they are what you scan for when you are parked outside.

Notes are for the things you want to remember at the door: a side entrance, a gate code you are allowed to keep, a reminder to collect something. They travel with the stop when you save the route.

Time at stop is the number of minutes you expect to spend there. It matters more than it looks, because the arrival time of every later stop depends on it. Ten stops at fifteen minutes each add two and a half hours to a day, and a round that ignores that will look far easier on screen than it is on the road.

The time window is an earliest and a latest arrival time in hh:mm, and either can be left empty. Leave both empty for a stop you can visit whenever suits the round. Fill only the earliest for a place that opens at a set time, or only the latest for something that must be done before a deadline.

The latitude and longitude show exactly where the pin sits on the map. They are useful for checking that a stop really landed where you meant, especially on rural roads or new estates.

Moving a stop by typing an address

If a stop is in the wrong place, you have two ways to fix it. You can drag its pin on the map, which is quick when you can see the right spot. Or you can type a new address or postcode in the dialog, and the stop moves there.

Typing is the better choice when you know the address but not the street layout, or when the pin is a long way off. Route searches the map region you have loaded, so the address has to be inside it. If it cannot be found in the current region, you are told, rather than the stop being dropped somewhere that merely looks similar. When that happens, check the spelling, try the postcode on its own, or ask whether the address is outside the region you prepared.

How the dialog fits the rest of a round

The details you set here feed straight into the bigger tools. Optimise order takes the time at stop and the window into account when it searches for the best sequence. The arrival and departure times shown for the round use them too, together with your set-off time, and any waits before a window opens or late arrivals after it closes are marked. If a round looks impossible, the stop dialogs are usually where the answer lies.

Because the time windows are soft, a stop with a tight window will not break the optimiser. If no order meets every window it may return a late stop and say so, which is a prompt to open that stop's dialog and ask whether the window is truly fixed.

Everything you set is kept when you save the round as an .ozroute file, so a regular weekly run only needs its details entering once.

A few habits that save time

Fill in time at stop for every visit before you optimise, not after. A round ordered without service times can look very different once they are added. Check the latitude and longitude of any stop that came from a partial postcode, since a partial postcode covers an area rather than a door. And when a customer moves, type their new address in the existing stop rather than deleting it and adding another, so the notes and window stay with them.

Small as it is, the stop dialog is where a list of addresses becomes a day you can actually drive.