Planning scenarios
EasyMap supported you in planning your sales territories. Area planning or restructuring should deal with different planning scenarios in order to design and balance areas as uniformly as possible and taking into account different criteria.
Systematic construction of area boundaries
Territory planning on the basis of areas
When defining territorial boundaries, given territory structures can be used as a support. Postal code areas, districts, municipalities or market areas of a particular industry are combined to form sales areas or other organizational units. A typical sales territory definition based on postal codes could look like this:
A typical sales territory definition based on postal codes could look like this:
Frankfurt area:
ZIP CODE 60 - 65, 67 - 69 + ZIP CODE 76726 - 76891
Stuttgart area:
PLZ 7xxxx without 76726 - 76891 + PLZ 88 - 89 complete
Munich area:
POSTCODE 80 - 87
The advantage of this approach is that the boundaries of the constructed areas are as precise as the boundaries of the area building blocks used. This procedure is called area aggregation. Another advantage of this approach is that all available data relating to the territorial building blocks can easily be extrapolated to the aggregated areas. If you know, for example, the sales volume in the postal code area, you can precisely calculate the sales volume in the sales area by forming totals.
Sales territory planning on the basis of points or customer locations
In some industries, customer relationships or customer-related structures are the decisive factor for further sales territory planning. This planning approach is useful if a sales employee has already been assigned to each customer. However, the assignment of customers to sales employees does not primarily represent a precise delimitation of sales territories. However, in order to convert customer-related sales territory definitions into areas, so-called Voronoi polygons are formed from the customer locations.
Note: However, this approach to territorial planning only makes sense with geocoded customer adresses. If you want to use a point level as a base map, you therefore need at least one address or coordinate list (e.g. the customer addresses) to create the new area structure. The wizard can create the corresponding point level while you are creating the new area structure.
Take locations into account when defining territories
Locations as well as territories can be the subject of planning, analysis and optimisation. The places of residence of existing sales representatives or existing branch offices are often criteria to be adhered to for territory planning. In EasyMap it is possible to create balanced territories based on predefined locations. For example, a maximum distance to the location can be specified in order to influence the area size. A balanced area size is important in order to minimize the travel time share of the individual employee and thus maximize the customer's time.
Locations can be inserted, changed or deleted manually. Location lists can also be imported. If there are already locations for certain sales territories, it is important that these locations either have identical numbers to the assigned sales territories or an assignment table exists in which the number or the name of the location is assigned to the sales territory number - more about using locations.
Top Down - Approach
In the area of territory planning, it happens that planning is not to be done from fine to coarse, but exactly in the opposite direction. For example, the regions should be kept the same in different lines, since the regional managers are responsible for several sales structures, or the regions must comply with certain limits such as the federal states or CT borders. You can either specify how many subareas the higher-level areas should be divided into, or you can specify target values (e.g. number of existing customers) for the lower-level areas, whereupon EasyMap calculates how many areas should be created - more about Top Down Optimization.
Different sales divisions with the same overall regional structure
If you want to use a point level as a base map, you need at least one address or coordinate list (for example, the customer addresses) to create the new territory structure. The wizard can create the corresponding scoring level while you create the new territory structure.
- Enter the existing distribution chain including the higher-level regional structure.
- Then copy the area structure and insert it into the same map folder or another map folder.
- So that you can plan the areas for the new distribution chain freely and still ensure that the higher-level regional structure remains unchanged, you should activate area protection for all areas at the higher level (for example, for all regions) (see lockings).
Greenfield Site
This situation is rare, but it does happen: Regardless of given structures, field staff or locations, you can plan "on a greenfield basis", e.g. if a new field staff line is to be introduced or an area division is to be defined for a temporary action. In this case, data on areas and sites are not available. For example, you can use the possibility to create superordinate levels at boundaries such as levels e.g. federal states in order to create optimal territories afterwards.
