Route Planning and Coverage for Pharmaceutical Reps

Suppose you’re a pharmaceutical sales operations manager with 25 new field reps to onboard. Use Salesforce Maps Advanced routing to create routes for the field reps’ first month, to help ensure that they meet the visit targets for the medical offices that they support. Use the following checklist to assemble your data and criteria before you generate routes.

Required Editions

View supported editions.

Note Salesforce Maps Advanced schedules reps for in-person visits only.

Pre-Implementation Checklist

Requirement	Scenario Details
Calendar object	The object that represents rep visits. In this scenario, rep visits appear as events on your reps’ Salesforce calendars, so your calendar object is the Event object.
Routable object for location data	The object containing the locations of your medical office accounts. In this scenario, assume that your Accounts object contains location data. If it doesn’t, create a custom object that contains the location data. With location data you can generate the most efficient routes for your reps.
Visit frequency and visit windows	In this scenario, the minimum and maximum days between visits are 10 and 30 days, respectively. Office business hours are 9 AM to 5 PM.
Visit object	The object containing data about whether your reps have completed a visit. In this scenario, your visit object is the Task object.
Assigned accounts	Accounts are assigned to reps through a user lookup field on the routable object. In this scenario, the account owner is responsible for visiting the medical offices. When you generate routes, the optimization process adds stops to your reps’ schedules for the accounts that they own.
Visit timeframe	You’re generating routes for the month of January, so your start date is January 1 and the end date is January 30.
Maximum shift length and other settings	Your field reps have a maximum shift of 8 hours.

Conflicting events on your reps’ calendars, such as days off, are accounted for when Salesforce Maps Advanced creates routes. You can regenerate routes at any time to accommodate changes such as rep rescheduling or company holidays.