Search by Place ID is a way for drivers to add stops to their trip plan. In addition to the other manual stop entry options, drivers can now also enter in a unique Place ID in CoPilot and add the matching custom Place to their trip. (Requires ALK Content Tools)

Creating a Place ID

The Place ID is defined when creating custom Places in ALK Content Tools, and can be added either on a per-Place basis (create or modify), or though the import process where bulk changes can be made.

Searching for a Place ID

The Search by Place ID is an offboard search – once the driver enters in the text string and taps Search, CoPilot will make a call to the ALK servers and check for matches. The results returned will include any custom Places in the account with a matching Place ID or Place name, where the match has to be exact from the start to the end of the search string. The search is not case sensitive.

For example: Depending on the search string used, the driver may need to select from one or multiple results.

Best Practices

Most fleets dispatch work to drivers based on a unique identifier within their Transportation Management System (TMS) or dispatch software. This goes by many names, such as location ID or customer code. Regardless of what your company calls it, this unique identifier can be applied to your custom Places as the unique Place ID.

Note that it is very common to have multiple unique identifiers for one physical location. For example, a single warehouse might have different identifiers for the dry goods vs. the frozen docks, or one for the business and one for the third party pallet provider, or there might be five tenants within the single building. This is fine as long as the custom Place has been created and the unique Place ID assigned. Any work communicated to the driver outside of the integrated dispatching system can still be added to the driver’s trip by manually searching for the associated Place ID.

Alignment with Sites

Each stop added to a trip through the Search by Place ID feature will behave the same as a stop added through the standard onboard custom Place search. If Sites functionality is active, the stop’s lat/long will be compared against both the onboard cache of previously routed Sites and the full offboard set of your fleet’s custom Places with Sites data defined, with the most up to date version found being used to enhance the route results. If no matching Site is found, then CoPilot will route to the stop’s location as usual.