Basic concepts

in the menu Area organization and in the context menus for the control window Area organization. However, to prevent the user from making unintentional changes to a territory structure, the commands for creating, changing and optimizing territories and locations must first be enabled with the command Planning Mode. It is recommended that you deactivate the planning mode immediately after you have finished editing the territory structure using the Planning Mode command to prevent unintentional further changes to the territory structure.

For sales territory and location planning, easymap requires an appropriate planning basis. Often any digital map is used for this purpose. The map used as planning basis is then called "basic map". It contains the basic building blocks for the formation of territories and forms the geographical framework for sales territory and location planning.

Instead of a digital map, easymap can also use the addresses of customers, target groups, location lists or similar, for which coordinates are available, as a basis for planning. In this case easymap generates a so-called point plane from the addresses or location coordinates and uses this as a basic map. The advantage: If, for example, the postcode map is used as a base map, the smallest unit that can be planned is the area of a postcode. If different customers have the same postal code, but are to be assigned to different sales representatives, this would not be possible. If, on the other hand, you use a point level based on customer addresses as a basic map, the smallest plannable unit is the individual customer. This means that customers with the same postal code can be assigned to different field sales representatives.

the word "territory" is used as a generic term for the areas to be planned. In practice, a wide variety of terms are used for this: sales representative district, sales area, sales region, service area, etc. A territory is any combination of bricks. A territory can consist of several unconnected sub-areas.

In a territorial organization with several hierarchical levels, the word "territory" is used as a general generic term for the territories in any hierarchical level.

In easymap territories are formed by combining the basic building blocks. If a digital map is used as a planning basis, one basic building block corresponds to one element of the basic map. If, on the other hand, a point level is used as a basic map, every single customer, address or location is a basic building block.

Elementary bricks	Base map	Territories
Postal code areas (areas)	postcode map	Territories
Customers	Point level (generated from customer addresses)	Commercial agent districts
Municipalities (areas)	Municipal boundary map	Franchise territories
Roads or road sections (lines)	Road network	Districts for brochure distribution
Buildings	Point plane (generated from the building coordinates)	Carrier districts for newspaper delivery

For area organizations with more than one hierarchical level, easymap distinguishes, where necessary, between bricks and basic blocks. The term "basic bricks" has already been defined above. The areas of the lowest hierarchy level are composed of the basic modules. The areas of the lowest hierarchy level are again the "bricks" for the superior hierarchy level and so on.

The term "territory" is used in easymap as a general generic term for any element of a territory organization as well as for any area in digital maps. Especially if the user calls the areas in "his" organization also "territory", special attention is required to avoid confusion.

In large sales and service organizations, there is usually also a hierarchically structured territory organization. For example, area sales managers are often responsible for an entire region. Sales representatives who each have a specific work area within the region to look after are subordinate to them. Each field service district can be defined by a set of postal codes.

easymap uses numbers to uniquely identify areas, because names often prove to be disadvantageous for identification purposes, as differences in spelling or abbreviations, for example, are not infrequent. Commonly used numbering systems in base maps are, for example, the postal codes and the official municipality and district codes. easymap also identifies territories by means of numbers. These may consist of numbers and letters.

Territory numbers: hierarchically structured or freely assigned

In the case of territorial organizations with more than one hierarchical level, the numbering system for the territories can also be structured hierarchically. To do this, you specify that the leading n digits of an area number represent the number of the higher-level area level. This corresponds to the numbering system in many large hotels: the first digit of the room number indicates the floor, the following two digits the consecutive number of the room on the floor.

Example 1: A territorial organisation has the regions 1=North, 2=West, 3=South and 4=East at the highest level. Each region is divided into eight sales areas. The sales areas are subdivided into a maximum of 12 representative districts. The agent's district number has 4 digits and can be read as follows: Agent District 3412 belongs to Sales Area 34 in Region 3.

Example 2: The 5-digit postal code in Germany contains the number of the postal zone (= the first digit of the postal code) and the number of the postal region (= the first two digits of the postal code). Postal code area 53175 is therefore located in postal code region 53 and this is in zone 5.

Example 3: The official 8-digit municipality code number is structured hierarchically as follows:

Point 1-2: State

Paragraphs 1-3: Administrative district

Numerals 1-5: Circle

Numbers 1-8: Community

Gemeinde Much (Gemeidekennziffer 05382036) belongs to the Rhein-Sieg district (Kreiskennziffer 05382); this belongs to the administrative district of Cologne (Reg.-Bez. 053) in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Land 05).

If your territory organization is structured hierarchically, a strictly hierarchical numbering system offers some advantages, e.g. that you can always see from the territory number alone to which superior unit a territory belongs. Nevertheless, you can assign the numbers of the areas for each level freely, i.e. independently of the numbers of the areas in other levels. These offer considerably more freedom in the area construction, e.g:

• Multiple assignments (that is, a postal code can, for example, be assigned to different sales representatives at the same time)
• so-called branching (i.e. one can, for example, simultaneously represent the "old" and the "new" regions above the same sales force districts)
• There are no restrictions when inserting or deleting intermediate levels
• Locks often have a more far-reaching effect on hierarchical area numbers

Territory-related locations belong to the territorial organization of the own company, e.g. sales locations such as regional headquarters, branches, dealer locations, offices of field staff, etc.

easymap assumes by default that a location is assigned to exactly one territory (1:1 assignment) and multiple assignments are not allowed. If you do not want this, you have to check the option Allow multiple assignments when creating a location level. Then a site can be assigned to several territories at the same time or a territory can have several sites.

In addition to numbers, names and other data, locations can also be assigned capacities. These can be considered as weighting in optimizations. For example, the different performance capabilities of field staff can be included in the calculations. Example: If the "old hand" is to receive an area that is 20% larger than the average due to his experience, a weighting or capacity of 120% would be assigned to him. If the newcomer is to be trained in an area that is 20% smaller than the average, they would be assigned a weighting of 80%.