Plan tomorrow's tour in minutes
Which machines need a visit, in what order, and what goes in the van. Drag one slider and watch tomorrow's tour draw itself.
In short
- Tour planning in CleaVend starts from live data: every machine is ranked by how urgently it needs a visit.
- You decide how urgent is urgent enough. The stops are then put in road order for you.
- The driver gets the tour on their phone — with the pick list for each stop, directions, and check-off that works without signal.
Ask a dispatcher how long it takes to plan tomorrow, and the answer is usually "about an hour, if nothing goes wrong." They look at last week's rounds, call a driver about the hospital, remember the station was busy because of the football, and draw something sensible on a mental map.
It's skilled work. It's also work a computer can do a good first draft of in seconds — if it knows what's actually happening in the machines.
Step one: who needs a visit?
CleaVend gives every machine an urgency score. It goes up when a bestseller is running low, when a machine is close to empty overall, when there's an open fault the driver could fix, or when the machine simply hasn't been visited in too long. It goes down when the machine is full and quiet.
The planner's job then becomes a single decision: how urgent does a machine have to be to make tomorrow's tour? Try it.
Drag to decide who makes the tour
Example machines and scores. Time assumes about 12 minutes per stop plus driving; real tours use real roads and your own visit rules.
Slide it right and the tour shrinks to the handful of machines that really can't wait. Slide it left and you fill the day, picking up machines that could have waited but are on the way anyway. Either way, the stops come out in a sensible order, and you can see straight away whether the day fits into a shift.
Step two: put the stops in order
Once you know who's on the tour, CleaVend orders the stops along the road, so the van isn't zig-zagging across town. You can still move a stop by hand — the hospital only lets you in before ten, the car showroom is closed on Mondays — and you can save rules like these per machine, so you don't have to remember them every time.
Tours you run often can be saved as templates. "Hospitals, Tuesday" becomes a starting point that already knows its sites, and CleaVend simply adds or drops machines based on today's urgency.
A map you already know. Every machine sits on the map, coloured by how it's doing. Planning a tour is mostly a matter of looking at the red and amber dots and deciding which to visit.
Step three: hand it to the driver
The finished tour lands on the driver's phone. For every stop they see:
- Where to go next, with a tap to open navigation.
- What to take from the van for that machine — the pick list, worked out from its sales.
- What's wrong, if the machine has reported a fault.
As they work, they tick stops off. And because basements, car parks and hospital corridors are famous for having no signal, check-off works offline: the phone remembers, and syncs as soon as it's back in range.
Back at the office, each finished visit shows up in the machine's filling history — what went in, when and by whom — so nobody has to chase paperwork at the end of the day.
Planning used to start with "where did we go last week?" Now it starts with "where are we needed tomorrow?"
What you get back
The obvious win is time: the first draft of tomorrow takes minutes instead of an hour. The bigger win is that the draft is based on what's happening now, so the van spends its day at machines that need it — not at the ones that happened to be on the list.
Want to see the step before this one? Read Your restock schedule is your biggest hidden cost. And for what happens at each stop, see The refill run, step by step.