FieldOne – Quick way to add Territories for the UK

Territories play are an important part in FieldOne and to understand the functionality provided by FieldOne you will need to setup territories.

Why do you need Territories

Once you have setup territories you can then use them with your resources at set their location.  The location information is used in

• Work Orders
• Scheduling assistant and routing engine
• Filters on the Schedule board

Once you have Territories setup, you can add locations to your resources and work orders.  You can then schedule resources near to the work orders by searching or FieldOne can help you do this by automatically routing using the routing engine or the Scheduling assistant.

Understanding

“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
― Anonymous

I recommend CRM developers add theory to the practical knowledge, which is Why CRM Developers should always start with the CRM SDK.

To get full understanding of something you need theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge, this will allow you to find the limitations and functionality of something.

FieldOne is a great example of this because it’s not really until you start to actively use the system by setting up a demo environment or put in customers data until you really begin to understand how it works.  I call this active learning and it’s where the knowledge and practical experience come together to start creating a solution.

List of Territories

The territory on resources specify which area(s) the resource can be allocated work from.

The first step is you want to download some territories, I have found a list of cities

https://github.com/Gibbs/UK-Postcodes/blob/master/postcodes.csv

You can see the postcodes have geocode details but in this case I’m not going to use them.

Territory

I now have a data to create some territories, I copy the postcodes csv to a new tab/csv, I deleted all the columns expect region and renamed this  Territory Name.  I selected Remove Duplicates so I had one row for each region, I save the file as Territory.csv

Territory postcodes

FieldOne can match partial postcodes, so if you add the postcode B32 it will match all B32 postcodes. To link postcodes to a territory you need to import into the entity called Zip Codes.  I used the original postcodes.csv and deleted all the fields except region and postcode and named the region Territory Name.  I saved the file as Territory Postcodes.csv

Import the file using Import Wizard and select the entity Zip Code

Next step

You will end up with 2700 territory postcodes

Next steps

You now have territories in CRM, the next logical step would be to create resources and then import a territory resource to the resource.

This sets up the territory where the resource can be scheduled for when using auto routing or the resource scheduler, if you do manual scheduling you can select any resource but you would probably filter by resource territory.

Below you can see I created some resources called

Birmingham Depot Truck Driver Test001 (to Test011) and created a service territory of Birmingham.  These trucks can be scheduled for Birmingham jobs

It’s a quick way to get territories into FieldOne, it’s more likely individual clients will have set territories and the data above won’t be specific for your customers.

The steps above will help you get some default territories in FieldOne so you can start to see how territories and scheduling work.