Calculate travel distance in FS, including or excluding traffic congestion

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Hi!

I've searched high and low, but I've gotten lost in the information. So I turn to the experts :)

I'm looking to find information on how the travel time/distance is calculated when a workorder is being scheduled. The reason for that, is that I want to be able to exclude and traffic congestion, road works, etc. A prospect requires a theoretical travel distance/time as opposed to the real-time traffic situation.

Moreover, it is possible that FS already does this, but I have no idea what happens behind the scene when travel time/distance is being calculated.

tl;dr:

- can I let FS calculate travel time/distance for a work order, based on the theoretical route, excluding traffic info?

- if that's not possible, what is the actual behavior of the travel time/distance? Does it include traffic or not?

Thank you!

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ram r on at

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Hope this helps

community.dynamics.com/.../field-service-scheduling-assistant

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Thomas David Dayman 11,323 on at

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Hi,

Below is the 'Get Driving Directions' which calculates both the time without traffic and time with traffic

Below is the 'Schedule Assistant' which calculates distance and time without traffic. (But if you use the Scheduling Assistant, then it will still add the Time with Traffic on the Work Order)

From my experience the work orders always seem to include time with traffic. But if you wish to see the time without traffic there are options there by using the 'Get Driving Directions' button from the Schedule Board.

Let me know if you want me to expand on anything.

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Community Member on at

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Thank you both for your help!

Ramanathan, I had already stumbled onto that article, but I hadn't found any info on the behavior of the route calculation.

Thomas, thank you for your detailed answer! That's what I needed. I suppose I need to expand on the premise of my question. A prospect wants to use the schedule function, but needs to keep record of the time without traffic. They reimburse travel expenses, but based on the theoretical travel time, excluding traffic. I'm fairly new to CRM, so I'm wondering if I can store the time/distance without traffic upon booking with a workflow?

Do mind, I'm not asking to detail instructions for me, I like to get my hands dirty and figure it out myself. It's just that the get driving directions seems to be a one-off trigger and I can't really seem to reach that information :)

Would that be possible, you think?

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Thomas David Dayman 11,323 on at

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Yeah it seems that the travel time is ran on the fly rather than stored in a database.

One possibility is that you could make a custom web resource which could calculate travel time using lang and lat of the resource address and the job address using the bings/google maps api? Then store the value in a custom field.

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ram r on at

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You can get the time value from bing maps webapi using a plugin or workflow or JS.

Documentation for the route API is as follows. By default the api returns time without trafic

msdn.microsoft.com/.../ff701717.aspx

Sample distance between two points

http://dev.virtualearth.net/.../Driving;wp.0=greenville&wp.1=newyork&avoid=minimizeTolls&key=<Your api key>

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