Skills

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

Drivers and vehicles carry the skills they hold:

• Drivers — Skill select on the driver in Registry → Drivers. See Drivers.
• Vehicles — the Vehicle skills card on the vehicle in Registry → Vehicles. See Vehicles.
• Workshifts — a workshift uses the skills of its driver and vehicles, unless you set them by hand with Set to manual skills. See Workshifts.

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 — Required skills and Prohibited skills in the location’s Location requirements card (e.g. “Loading dock access”), so every order to that location inherits them. See Locations and the skills field in the Orders Import API.
• Products — Required skills and Prohibited skills in the product’s Product requirements card (e.g. ADR for dangerous goods). Via the API, each entry has a skillType of REQUIRED, PROHIBITED, or UNKNOWN. See Products and 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. Settings is available to Admins.

1. Go to Settings → Reference data → Skills.
2. Click New skill.
3. Fill in the Name and, optionally, a Description.
4. Click Save.
5. Use it on drivers and vehicles (skills they have) and on orders, locations and products (skills they require).

To delete a skill, open it and click Delete. The panel asks Delete skill? This can’t be undone.

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 (Skill select on the driver in Registry → Drivers) and the skills of the workshift in Registry → Workshifts.
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.

Related topics

• Drivers — assign skills to drivers.
• Settings — create and maintain the skill library.
• Orders Import API — order and location skill fields.
• Product Upsert API — product skill requirements.