Is it possible to combine a Calendar Report and a Google Maps API integration to figure out routing/scheduling for our service employees?
Here's an overview of our situation: we have a handful of employees that go out and perform a specific type of service call, and there are 3 possible timeslots for those service calls per day.
When our administrative employees go to schedule a service call with a customer (whose information is already entered in our "customers" table), I'd like to be able to have something that pulls the customer's address and automatically compares it to each of our service employees' addresses (we don't use GPS tracking, but each one tends to stay in a certain radius, so their home address is a proxy for their real-time address) to figure out which of them is closest. Then, once the closest one is identified, feeds that into an "add to calendar" button that lets you create a new event based on that closest employee and the customer's information, and the user can pick a time slot.
The major problem seems to be that the Calendar feature is a report, and not a widget, so I can't set it up where the search is right next to the open calendar and the user doesn't have to switch back and forth between app tabs to find the closest one then check their availability. If this is a correct assessment of that hurdle, is there any decent workaround to it, and if not, what would be the way to incorporate a calendar view on the same page as the search/routing?
I'm already looking into the google maps API family, including the Distance Matrix one, which I will likely be implementing (display multiple routes based on one or more origins/endpoints, but in this case it would just be multiple routes based on one endpoint and a preset number of origins), but definitely open to any number of suggestions!
When our administrative employees go to schedule a service call with a customer (whose information is already entered in our "customers" table), I'd like to be able to have something that pulls the customer's address and automatically compares it to each of our service employees' addresses (we don't use GPS tracking, but each one tends to stay in a certain radius, so their home address is a proxy for their real-time address) to figure out which of them is closest. Then, once the closest one is identified, feeds that into an "add to calendar" button that lets you create a new event based on that closest employee and the customer's information, and the user can pick a time slot.
The major problem seems to be that the Calendar feature is a report, and not a widget, so I can't set it up where the search is right next to the open calendar and the user doesn't have to switch back and forth between app tabs to find the closest one then check their availability. If this is a correct assessment of that hurdle, is there any decent workaround to it, and if not, what would be the way to incorporate a calendar view on the same page as the search/routing?
I'm already looking into the google maps API family, including the Distance Matrix one, which I will likely be implementing (display multiple routes based on one or more origins/endpoints, but in this case it would just be multiple routes based on one endpoint and a preset number of origins), but definitely open to any number of suggestions!
