Background info: My company has been selling Sunrooms & Spas in NC for the past 28 years. At one time or another, we have covered the entire state other than the Outer Banks. Now, we are located in Hickory, Boone, & Winston Salem NC but we still service 99% of our customers. Because of our widespread sales, we may send service men on a 4 hour trip to do repairs. Our Service Manager is not the best in the world with geographical knowledge and I'm trying to fix that.

What I need: Software that will allow our Service Manager to input an address when we receive a service call and then display all Outstanding calls on a map. This info will be updated daily. I also would like for her to be able to select specific calls and then have the software do the routing (preferably sorting by efficient travel).

After playing around with it, I started her on Google Maps yesterday using "My Maps". It works much better in theory than it does in practice. Adding a point to the map is drag & drop and it won't snap to the location you just entered. It also doesn't have any kind of efficiency to the routing and the way it prints the directions just plain sucks.

Any ideas? I've searched for several different terms on google and I keep getting high-level fleet routing which is way outside of my needs and would end up way to high on cost. Everything else is your trip software and there's 0 good information on most of them to figure out what to try and what not to.

Thanks in advance to anyone that has some ideas.

9/12/2009 2:10:20 PM

http://www.tomtomwork.com/us/landingpages/video/video.xml

No idea the cost.

9/12/2009 3:42:10 PM

i spent a lot of time researching this and got quotes in the $20k ballpark for total fleet management solutions but i really just needed routing software.

for what i think you are needing you should look at some of the fleet GPS solutions, many of them will do the routing and reporting you want and will come in less expensive than the total software packages. you will be looking at an initial cost for the equipment and monitoring costs typically around $20-$30/month/truck. many have in car GPS as well that you can route and send instructions to from the office on the fly.

the company that developed the database software we use has been getting a lot of feedback that people want to add these features, and I have been working on a high level breakdown of the features i want, but it would be a couple years out at least.

one thing to think about when considering pricing is how much money could it save. the software i was considering would allow you to analyze a new office location and help you figure out if you would save money by opening a new branch in various areas or if you should service those clients from your current location. (might not apply if you all aren't expanding)

i'll see if i can find my notes, let me know if you find anything

in the mean time i have been using a mashup of mappoint and our GPS vehicle repors.

9/12/2009 5:00:30 PM

TomTom thing is nice but outside of our service type (we don't do immediate service 99.9% of the time). I also only have 2 main service guys so fleet mgmt. is WAY out there for my needs. I simply don't have the manpower to take advantage of a system like that and save any money whatsoever. I also don't really NEED the gps tracking.

My service calls make take 1-2 weeks to get scheduled depending on the call, the area, & the customer. I want my Service manager to be able to pull up the map in the software and say "Ok, I have 5 calls in Charlotte, 2 in Asheville, 1 in Rockingham, etc." so that we can determine not only where they need to be sent but WHEN.

My main need is on the mapping side. I need a program that will basically allow me to input my own POI (service calls) with details, display these on a map until they are deleted, and be able to do "smart" routing. It also needs to be extremely user friendly since she is not technologically "gifted" whatsoever (This is to get her to where she doesn't get up and walk out of her office to a big NC map to see where places are AND to increase her scheduling efficiency). This is the biggest "need" for me. If this exists in a service order program that's not cost prohibitive for such a small company then great. If I need to just settle for a mom & pop vacation software, that's fine also.

And yes, I do realize how nice it would be to have everything streamlined with one program that sends everything directly to the appropriate people but I've been shot down repeatedly on that. So I'm having to settle for making small steps.


*edit* Thanks for that pooljobs. MapPoint was one that I had found earlier that looked pretty decent but had lost the name of. Is it pretty easy to use?

[Edited on September 12, 2009 at 8:31 PM. Reason : .]

9/12/2009 8:22:07 PM