The Scenario
It is Monday morning at 7:30 AM. You are a dispatch manager and the order team finished uploading tomorrow's 250 orders into OptimoRoute overnight. Your job now is to kick off the optimization engine — OptimoRoute needs to run its planning algorithm for Tuesday's date before drivers can be briefed — and record the planning job ID somewhere the team can reference when checking status.
The job ID is the only handle you have for checking whether planning completed or failed. Without it written down somewhere accessible, the team has to log into OptimoRoute and navigate to the planning screen to check — which means every "did planning finish?" question gets routed back to you.
The bad version:
- You log into OptimoRoute, navigate to the planning panel, select Tuesday's date, and manually trigger the optimization run.
- You copy the returned job ID from the screen — a string that looks like it was generated by a random character generator — and paste it into a Slack message so the team has it.
- Three hours later someone asks you for the job ID again because the Slack message scrolled out of view, and you have to go back to OptimoRoute to find it.
Nothing failed catastrophically. It just required your attention three times for a task that should have needed it once.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It can call OptimoRoute's planning API directly — triggering the optimization run for a given date and writing the returned job ID back into the sheet where the whole team can see it.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and ask:
Start OptimoRoute route planning for tomorrow's date and write the returned planning job ID into cell H1 of this sheet.
What You Get
- OptimoRoute's optimization engine is triggered for the specified date.
- The planning job ID is written into cell H1 immediately after the API call returns.
- The job ID stays in the sheet — anyone on the team can reference it without asking you.
- If the trigger call fails, the error message is written into H1 instead so you know what went wrong.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The date should be read from a cell, not hardcoded
Trigger OptimoRoute route planning for the date in cell A1 and write the returned job ID into cell B1.
The team also wants the planning status written in after triggering
After triggering OptimoRoute planning for the date in cell A1, write the job ID into B1 — then check the planning status and write the current status into B2.
Planning needs to be triggered for multiple dates in sequence
For each date in column A, trigger OptimoRoute route planning and write the returned job ID into the corresponding cell in column B — process each date in order, pausing between calls.
The planning date is not entered yet, and the team needs a cleanup check before triggering
Check that all orders in the 'Orders' tab have a non-blank address and order number — list any problem rows in the 'Errors' tab — and if there are none, trigger OptimoRoute route planning for tomorrow and write the job ID into cell A1 of the 'Planning' tab.
One prompt does the pre-flight check and the trigger in sequence. You do not need to run validation as a separate step.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the sheet where your planning dates and status tracking live, then ask it to trigger OptimoRoute for tomorrow and land the job ID in the cell you use for status tracking. Also worth seeing: how to bulk-upload orders before triggering, and how to export route details after planning completes.