Preview Sandbox
Model territory changes by hand and see the effect immediately, without touching live data.
The Preview sandbox at /home/<team>/optimize/preview is a what-if workspace. Move postal areas between regions, watch the numbers respond, and keep the version you like — all without changing anything your team is working from.
What you can do
Reassign areas. Select postal areas on the map and assign them to a different region.
Watch the comparison update. A statistics panel shows before and after side by side as you work, so you can see immediately whether a move helps or just moves the problem.
See the distribution. Charts show how your metrics are spread across regions, which makes it obvious when you have evened out one metric by unbalancing another.
Check against thresholds. A metric thresholds card shows whether your proposed regions would sit inside the ranges you have set in Alerts.
Export. Download the proposed assignment as CSV to circulate or work with elsewhere.
Save it. Keep a scenario as a named configuration.
The sandbox never modifies your team's actual data, and it never reaches your source system. You can experiment as freely as you like.
What saved configurations are for
A saved configuration is more than a bookmark. It can be used as:
- A report source. Generate a report against the scenario rather than against live data — useful for presenting a proposal. See Reports.
- A starting point for an optimization run. Instead of optimizing from your current structure, start from a scenario you have already shaped by hand. This is particularly useful with the Boundary Rebalance approach, which makes small adjustments to an existing structure rather than redrawing it. See Running an Optimization.
- A view in the Data Editor. Point the map at the configuration to review it properly.
How to use it well
Change one thing at a time. Move a few areas, look at the effect, then decide what to do next. Making a dozen changes at once tells you nothing about which of them mattered.
Watch more than one metric. Balancing client counts often unbalances hours, because clients differ in how much service they need. Switch the metric you are looking at as you work.
Look at the shape. A region that has become a long thin corridor, or that now wraps around another, is a travel problem no matter how even the numbers look.
Keep moves adjacent. Moving an area to a region it does not touch produces a disconnected territory. It balances beautifully on a spreadsheet and is unworkable in practice.
Save the versions you might defend. If you are going to present options, save each one so you can generate a report against it later.
When to use Preview instead of an optimization run
| Use Preview when | Use an optimization run when |
|---|---|
| You already know roughly what change you want | You do not know what the answer should be |
| The change is small — a few areas | The whole structure needs rethinking |
| You need to test a specific proposal someone made | You want the numbers to propose something |
| You want to hand-tune an optimization result | You are starting from scratch |
The two work well together: run an optimization to get a proposal, then open it in Preview and adjust it for the operational realities the algorithm does not know about.