What the Optimize button actually does

Optimize is not a black box. This guide explains the exact order it builds, how appointment windows are respected, what the miles numbers mean, and its honest limits.

Where: Route Manager -> a technician's day -> Optimize; the field app's route screen has the same action

1. Optimize groups the day's located stops by appointment window first: morning stops, then anytime stops, then afternoon stops. A stop with a window is never reordered out of it to save miles.
2. Inside each group it orders stops by real driving distance, chaining from where the previous group ends. If your day starts from a depot, the depot anchors the first leg.
3. The office preview compares your current order against the optimized one using the same road-distance data, so the before-and-after miles are an honest apples-to-apples comparison.
4. If road data is unavailable, the app falls back to straight-line distance and labels the result as an estimate instead of presenting it as road miles.
5. The office and the field app use the same solver, so an office-optimized day and a tech-optimized day can never disagree about the order.