Territory Planning Optimization Considerations and Settings in Salesforce Maps

This article explains how territory optimization works in Salesforce Maps Territory Planning and covers the constraints and settings you can use to create balanced, well-defined territories.

Unit-Level Constraints

• Lock Units: You can lock units to territories, which means they will not move during optimization, but the value of those units is still considered when creating balanced areas.

Area-Level Constraints and Settings

• Geographic Profile: You can set this to contiguous or non-contiguous depending on the type of area you want optimization to produce. Contiguous areas are compact and drivable, and will not overlap with other areas. Non-contiguous areas overlap with other non-contiguous areas and are not drivable. If a single request contains both contiguous and non-contiguous areas, all areas are optimized as contiguous first, and then the non-contiguous areas are re-optimized.
• Balance Percentage: Use this setting to define a relative percentage of the attribute that an area should receive, allowing some areas to be intentionally larger or smaller than others.
• Area Centers: You can pin the area center for areas you want located in a specific geographic area. The optimization engine attempts to build territories around that center, but this is a soft constraint — just one factor in scoring an optimization result. If every center in a problem is pinned, the optimization engine weighs those centers more heavily, at the cost of overall balance.

Important Notes

• Optimization cannot be used on area attributes.
• Optimization can be subject to various configurable constraints.
• Optimization only considers the units and areas that are in focus.