SAP Business ByDesign Google Route Planner Mashup

You can now leverage the new Google Route Planner in BYD HTML5 Client. The Google Route Planner is a custom mashup available in the Order Pipeline view of Field Service and repair work center. This mashup helps to plan the driving route across different service locations.

The prerequisites to use the google route planner can be found in Prerequisites for BYD Google Route Planner Mashup. The Google route planner is available in both SAP BYD desktop and mobile apps.

How Google Route Planner made Jim Bob’s life easier:

Mr. Jim Bob is working as Area Service Executive. His job involves traveling to client locations to perform services. Before starting his work, he would search for each of the service location addresses with google maps to plan his driving route. Doing this every day was an overhead for Jim as it costs more time and effort just to decide a driving route.

This is when Jim gets to know about the new google route planner available within BYD and gives it a try. On adding this mashup to the route planning screen, he is able to see the optimized driving route plotted for him within the BYD client. This helps Jim save more time and encourages him to perform more services per day, eventually making him much more productive.

Let us see how Jim uses the route planner mashup:

1. Jim selects the orders he plans to execute for the day, from Order Pipeline OWL.  Then he clicks on the Route Planning Button:

2. In the route planning screen, he sets the start and end location of his choice. The Google map renders the optimized route between the mentioned start and end location, covering the service locations (waypoints).

Alphabets are marked along the route to imply the order in which the locations are covered by the driving route. In the above map, each alphabet corresponds to a location covered in the route:

A : Start Address,

B : First Service location address,

C : Second Service location address,

D : End Address

3. Jim clicks on the custom navigate button at the top right corner of the map to open the rendered route in the Google maps web app. Then he sends the route coordinates to his phone and starts driving to the service locations without any hustle:

What is different in BYD Mobile Google Route planner?

The Google route planner mashup in BYD mobile app considers the start and end location as the current device geolocation. This helps you to plan the route from your current location.

The navigate button in mobile route planner map will open the route in the mobile Google maps, from where you can start the navigation straight away:

BYD Mobile App was in its Beta version at the time of writing this blog.

Did you Know?

1. The Google route planner employs “Travelling salesman” algorithm to find the most optimized driving route across locations.

2. The Google route planner would flag “no route found” when:

• Any of Start or End location is invalid.
• There is no DRIVING route found between the locations.

3. The Google route planner ignores any invalid way-points when plotting the route for you. The ignored way-point(s) is flagged in the message area once the route map is rendered.

That’s all folks! Happy Route Planning 🙂