Planning scenarios
easymap supports you in planning your sales territories. A territory planning or territory restructuring should deal with different planning scenarios in order to design and balance territories as uniformly as possible and under consideration of 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, for example
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 is already assigned to each customer. However, the assignment of customers to sales employees is not primarily a precise delimitation of sales territories. However, to convert customer-related sales area definitions into areas, Voronoi polygons are created 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 can be the subject of planning, analysis and optimization just like territories. The residences of existing sales representatives or existing branch offices are often criteria to be observed for sales territory planning. In easymap it is possible to create balanced territories based on given locations. For example, a maximum distance to the location can be specified to influence the territory size. A balanced territory size is important in order to minimize the travel time of the individual employee and thus maximize the time at the customer's site.
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 sales territory planning it happens that planning should not be done from fine to rough, but exactly in the opposite direction. For example, the regions in different lines should be kept the same, since the regional managers are responsible for several sales structures, or the regions should comply with certain boundaries, such as the federal states or PPA boundaries. You can either specify how many subareas the superior territories should be divided into, or he can specify target values (e.g. number of existing customers) for the subordinate territories, whereupon easymap calculates how many territories would have to 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.
