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Skills Management

Skills are tags that constrain which driver can handle an order. You give drivers the skills they hold, set the skills an order requires (directly, or via its locations and products), and the optimizer only assigns a stop to a driver who passes the skill check.

What skills are

A skill is a tag — for example “ADR”, “Refrigerated”, or “Forklift” — drawn from your organisation’s skill library. ADR is the European standard for moving dangerous goods such as fuel or chemicals.

Skills are checked in two directions:

  • Required — the driver must have the skill. (Most common.)
  • Prohibited — the driver must not have the skill. Useful for negative rules, e.g. “this customer doesn’t want a trainee driver”.

The optimizer respects both: a stop is never assigned to a driver who is missing a required skill or who holds a prohibited one. When you manually assign an order whose required skills the driver doesn’t have, the planner shows a warning.

Where skills apply

A driver carries the skills they hold. The requirements that those skills are checked against can come from several places:

  • The order — skills required for the pickup and delivery, validated on import (INVALID_PICKUP_SKILL_CODE / INVALID_DELIVERY_SKILL_CODE).
  • Locations — a location can carry its own required/prohibited skills (e.g. “Loading dock access”), so every order to that location inherits them. See the skills field in the Orders Import API.
  • Products — a product can require skills for handling it (e.g. ADR for dangerous goods). Each entry has a skillType of REQUIRED, PROHIBITED, or UNKNOWN. See Product Upsert.

The effective requirement for a stop is the combination of the order’s, its location’s, and its products’ skills.

Managing the skills library

The skills available to tag come from a single library in Settings.

  1. Go to Settings → Skills (under Master data).
  2. Add skill with a name.
  3. Save.
  4. Use it on the Driver page (skills the driver has) and on the order, location, or product (skills they require).

Renaming or deleting a skill affects everywhere it is currently used — drivers, orders, locations, and products. Check that a skill is no longer in use before removing it.

Troubleshooting

Orders won’t assign / a driver is rejected for a stop

  1. Check what the stop requires — the order, its locations, and its products can each add required or prohibited skills.
  2. Check the driver’s skills on the Driver → Skills tab.
  3. Make sure at least one available driver holds every required skill and none of the prohibited ones.
  4. For a one-off exception, adjust the driver’s skills (or the requirement) rather than forcing an unsafe assignment.
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