Facilities and where routes start

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Should a route start at the yard, at a driver's house, or somewhere else? The answer comes down to one list, and it is probably not the one you think. Facilities in the sidebar is the list of places your business runs from. Lakeshore has four: three yards and a repair shop. These hold your inventory. A unit sits at one of them, and on a company with branches its yard decides which branch it belongs to. Open one to keep the address, a contact, a phone number, amenities and opening hours together. Here is the part that trips people up. Route optimization never reads this page, and the line above the list says where it looks instead. The repair shop could be a hundred miles away and no route would change. Routes read Settings, Routing, and the Depots card near the bottom. Depots are the only places a truck can leave from or come back to. Each one needs a map location, shown under its address, and one carries the Default badge. Adding a yard you already keep on the Facilities page takes one pick: Copy from a facility brings over its address and map pin, and you save. So yes, a route has to start at a depot. There is no separate option for a driver's home. If a truck really starts the day from a house, add that address here as a depot, then make it the truck's Route start. On Route Plan, Plan this day has a Start and an End. Start lists your depots. Pick one, and every truck in this plan leaves from it, unless the truck has a Route start of its own. PortaPro remembers your last choice. Auto lets each truck decide: its Home Yard first, then its branch's depot, then the default depot. The line under the picker spells out which. Home Yard is set on the truck in Fleet, like this pump truck at Brook Park Lot. On Auto it starts there, whether you run one yard or three. Edit Vehicle keeps it with two more choices, Route start and Route end. Leave them on Use Route Plan's choice unless a truck always starts or finishes somewhere else, because they win over Route Plan every day. And with no depot at all, the plan starts from the middle of the day's stops and warns you, so drive times and miles won't be right. Add a depot before you trust the numbers. End can match the start, go to a different depot, or finish at the last stop. End at last stop leaves out the drive back, which suits a driver who heads straight home from the final job. Dumping is handled by a third list, Disposal Sites, under Fleet Management. When a pumping route would fill the tank, the plan adds a trip to a site like this one in the middle of the day. It has to be active, approved, on the map, and take portable toilet, septic or grease waste. Landfills and clean fill yards are skipped for those dump stops, because a pump truck can't empty there. The truck also needs its waste tank size. Without it, the plan can't tell when the tank is full, and it tells you so instead of guessing. Back on the map, the Depots and dumps button shows or hides those places, so you can see where every route begins and ends.

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