You can define the areas where your business operates in by drawing region boundaries on a map, and thereby facilitate the association between regions and the sites, workforce, jobs, quotes and assets in your Loc8 system.
You can draw your own boundaries using the in-app drawing tool or import them as a geoJSON file from any other mapping service.
The advantage of having regions is that once you have defined them, you can view, action and report against your quotes, jobs, assets etc. by any of those regions. Additionally, you will experience improved jobs assignments when assigning people to the jobs that are within within their work regions.
In this article, we will see how to:
Creating a region
STEP 1 From the Settings page, go to Regions and open the Add region window.
STEP 2 Give a name to the new region so as to clearly identify what it represents and then indicate the locations that will come under this region using the drawing tool.
STEP 3 To draw the region boundary, click and drag the cursor to create the sides of the polygon, making sure that you include the required locations within this polygon. As you draw, try creating a closed loop so that you end at the point where you had started from. This is a requirement in creating a valid region.
A valid region will look as shown below:
If you want to delete a region boundary and start over again, just click the delete option available on this region.
NOTE 1 : If the region has subregions, deleting the region will not affect its subregions.
NOTE 2: To delete the region completely, choose Delete on the more menu options, as shown below:
Once you've drawn the region on the map, you will see a geoJSON code is automatically derived to help you reuse the region along with its important details such as the associated coordinates on the map.
Using the code, you can render the region on any other mapping service exactly the way you see here and perform advanced functionalities offered in that service.
STEP 4 The new region is ready. Save it and see how the regions automatically associate with the corresponding sites, assets, quotes and jobs across Loc8.
Besides the automatic association between the region and its sites, you may also need to manually associate a site with a region. To know more, see Associating Regions with Sites Manually.
Creating a subregion
A region created within another region is referred to as a subregion in Loc8.
Using the drawing tool, you can create either nested subregions or have multiple subregions within a single region.
For example, you can
create nested subregions to accurately define the hierarchy of sites, such as to distinguish the different zones of a large property you manage for your customer
create multiple subregions on the same level to group the various customer locations under a single entity, such as having a subregion based on the facilities (Buildings, real estate property, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), for example) existing across the region
STEP 1 From the Regions page, open the primary region for which you want to create a subregion.
STEP 2 On the region inspector, you will find that the Show subregions section prompts the subregions available for the regions and also the option to create a new subregion.
STEP 3 To create a subregion, you will follow the same steps as you had for creating the primary region. Only in this case, the boundary must exist within the primary region boundary for the association to take place.
In this way, you can create multiple subregions on the same level, or create layers of subregions to form a hierarchy.
All the subregions are listed under the section as shown below and you can navigate to view or edit them directly from here:
Your regions are now set in Loc8.
Now, when a quote, job or asset location falls under one of the defined regions, their respective inspectors will clearly indicate the association of the location with the region.
Regions also form a useful tool in improved job assignments. To learn more, see Add Regions to your Workforce for Improved Job Assignments.