Since labor has been known as an organized human activity, one of the main issues has been to try to establish different types of control that would allow us to keep labor localized.

Locate workers by zones

Obviously, today, this concern is still intact and it would not be very difficult to dispel it when we are talking about permanent workers who, as a general rule, carry out all or most of their professional activity in a specific place, possibly the company’s headquarters. However, when it comes to the issue of locating mobile workers by zone, things can get a little more complicated. It is easy to deduce why, given the idiosyncrasies of the itinerant employee’s own job, which makes zoning mobile workers not so easy, since most of their working day is spent outside the office, traveling, on the road, visiting different customers, offering different types of assistance… However, the need to be able to zone mobile workers goes beyond the simple fact of wanting to keep them under control. In fact, being able to establish their location on a map could facilitate their work and also that of supervisors, thereby raising the company’s quality and productivity standards. It is clear that if this type of employee is constantly on the move, the best way to locate a mobile worker is to place them on a map, monitoring their position in real time, thanks to a simple location software that, through a simple app installed on a mobile device, allows us to know where each person is at any given moment, just by using Internet access. We must say that these geolocation apps already exist and, in the case of Bixpe, they work in a simple and effective way, allowing the location by zones and real-time monitoring of the entire mobile workforce. Once it is clear to us that we can locate mobile workers on a web map. We could go a little further and ask ourselves why make zones on that web map and what do they bring to the company?

The concept: zoning

According to Wikipedia, Zoning, in a broad sense, indicates the division of a geographic area into homogeneous sectors according to certain criteria. For example: productive capacity, type of permitted constructions, intensity of a threat, degree of risk, etc. But in cases that fall under the responsibility of mobility companies, the concept of zoning must be more urban and we must conceive of this zoning as the practice of dividing a locality, a town, into sections that will be reserved for very specific purposes, whether residential, commercial or industrial.

Zones on map for mobile companies

Now we need to see how we can benefit our company by dividing the map into zones. How are we going to use this concept for the day-to-day running of our company? Assuming that we have a large part of our workforce that is itinerant and spends part or even all of the day on the road, away from the offices, using zones can help us to delimit the areas in which each of the mobile workers must work. This delimitation can be structured by streets, neighborhoods, cities, roads… the sectors depend on the interests of the company and the important thing about the segmentation of the territory is to be able to assign a zone to each corresponding employee.

What are the zones for?

To simplify the work, to optimize routes, to improve the quality of assistance, to reach the end customer sooner… the reasons are varied and, of course, all of them are of vital importance for the company. Let’s take a practical example and, for this, let’s take a group of sales representatives as the protagonists. Let’s imagine that their customers are located, but the company does not have them visually located on a map that allows them to “group” them. Delimiting the zones would allow each user to have their client portfolio located and in the event that the employee leaves their zone for any reason, the company would receive an instant notification by e-mail, warning that this particular employee is not in their work zone. With this system we achieve three objectives at once: control over the work execution areas of each mobile employee, respect for the clientele of other colleagues and control of the employee, by the company, in real time.

Creating zones on a map: practical example

Suppose we have a team of elevator technicians in Madrid. Each of them works an area but we do not have the ability to control exactly where they operate in each case. If we have designated a technician for the south zone, we do not want to work the north zone because for that we already have staff assigned to the north of Madrid. How can we solve it? By creating zones in our employee location map. Let’s see the steps.

Step 1

Give a name to the new zone to identify it. For example “Technicians south zone”.

Step 2

If you want, you can give a more detailed description of the area.

Step 3

Who do you want to be able to see the area when they look at the control map? You can view it by yourself or enable anyone you want to have access to it as well. You may want to be the only one who controls the zones, or you may want the control teams to help you.

Step 4

Choose the shape of the area, it can be circular or polygonal.

Step 5

Last push, the colors. Undoubtedly something important, because visually it is one of the best ways to identify and differentiate the areas with a simple glance. Take a look at the photo in this article and everything will be clearer.

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