Tags are one of the most powerful — and most misunderstood — tools in Mover. This article explains what Tags are, where you’ll meet them, and how to use them to drive planning, execution, and communication automatically.
What Are Tags?
Tags are a simple but powerful way to organize your operation in Mover. A Tag is a label you attach to an Order, Service, or Route so the system knows how to treat it.
You’ll find a Tags field in almost every domain of the platform, which makes Tags the common language you use to cluster things together, filter them, and drive automated behavior both inside Mover and in the systems connected to it.
Most of the value of Tags comes from what they let you automate. Instead of handling each Order by hand, you describe its characteristics once with Tags, and the platform uses those characteristics to plan it on the right Route, give the Driver the right amount of time, assign it to the right Carrier, and send the right message to the recipient.
Where You’ll Find Tags
Tags appear throughout the platform, but the three domains where they matter most are:
Orders and Services, where Tags describe the delivery itself: its service level, special requirements, or origin.
Route Planning, where Tags on Orders drive how Routes are built and which rules apply.
Routes, where Tags describe the Route as a whole (the vehicle type, the fuel, the number of Drivers) and power your day-to-day filtering and monitoring.
The first time you’ll meet Tags is when creating a new Order. The Order form includes a Tags field where you can add any Tags that apply.
These Order Tags then flow into Route Planning and Communication, which is where most of their work gets done.
How to Decide What Deserves a Tag
A Tag earns its place when it changes how an Order is planned, executed, or communicated. If a characteristic makes no difference to any of those, it probably doesn’t need to be a Tag.
Work through the questions below. Wherever your answer is “it depends” or “not all of them,” you’ve likely found a Tag.
Planning
Are all Orders for a day planned together in one run, or are some planned first and some later?
Does each Distribution Center plan its own Routes, at separate times?
Do you run different delivery flows that use different capacity or cut-off times?
Vehicles
Do all Orders fit on all vehicles? If not, what makes the difference (two-person, refrigerated, oversized)?
Are there special requirements a vehicle must meet, such as permissions or equipment?
Task time
Do all Orders get the same Task Time? If not, what drives the difference (curbside, room-of-choice, assembly, removal)?
Are some deliveries slower because of access, such as no elevator, hard parking, or a new customer who needs extra care?
Proof of delivery
Do some Orders need a stricter proof, such as a photo for precious goods or a name and signature for business recipients?
Carrier assignment
Do you work with more than one Carrier, and should certain Routes always go to a specific one?
Communication
Do recipients differ in language, preferred channel (SMS or email), or how much communication they want?
Monitoring
Do you want to filter Routes quickly by team, region, or the person responsible for monitoring them?
How Tags Are Used
Splitting Your Route Plans
When your Orders are imported and you’re ready to plan, you rarely want to optimize every Order for the day in a single run. Tags let you split planning into the batches that match how you actually operate.
Our recommendation is to plan separately for each Distribution Center, so tag every Order with the name of its Distribution Center. If you also run separate picking turns with different cut-off times, add a Tag for the moment of day the Order should be planned for (morning, afternoon, evening, night). And if you run different delivery flows that use different capacity, give each flow its own Tag. With these Tags in place, each Route Optimization run picks up only the Orders it should.
Applying Rules in Route Planning
Once Orders carry the right Tags, your Rule Sets can act on them. This is where Tags turn from labels into logic.
Matching Orders to vehicles. If some Orders require two people, tag them so they can only be planned on Vehicle Groups driven by two people. The same pattern covers any special requirement: refrigerated goods to refrigerated vehicles, oversized Orders to trucks with the right permissions, and so on. Tag the Order with its requirement, then configure which Vehicle Groups accept which Tags.
Assigning the right Task Time. Different service levels take different amounts of time. Curbside, room-of-choice, assembly, and removal each carry their own Task Time, and Tags are how you tell the system which is which. The same logic extends to customer-specific conditions: a new customer you want to treat with extra care, a recipient on the top floor of a building with no elevator, or a delivery in a city centre where parking is hard. Tag these situations and grant the Driver more or less time accordingly, so your planned times stay realistic.
Enriching Routes at Creation
Route Planning can also add Tags to the Routes it creates. If you want the Route events you receive to include details like the vehicle type, the fuel, or the number of Drivers, configure Route Planning to Tag every Route built with a given vehicle type. Those Tags then travel with the Route and its events, so the systems downstream get the context they need.
Controlling Proof of Delivery
Tags decide when a stricter Proof of Delivery applies. If you’re delivering precious goods, you may want the Driver to take a photo. If you’re delivering to a company, you may want to capture the name and signature of the person who received the goods. Tag those Orders and the Driver App will ask for the right proof at the right stop.
Automating Carrier Assignment
If you work with more than one Carrier, Tags let you automate which Routes go to whom. By mapping Vehicle Groups in your Route Planning Rule Sets to a preferred Carrier, you can forward Routes automatically based on simple rules, for example sending every Route from a particular Distribution Center to a specific Carrier.
Tailoring Communication
Recipients don’t all want the same communication. Some prefer English rather than your country’s language, some prefer SMS over email, and some want every update (day-before, pickup completed, ETA, delays) while others want only the essentials. Capture each of these preferences as a Tag and apply the Tag to your Communication templates, so each message is triggered only for the recipients who asked for it.
Building Views and Filters
Tags also make your daily work faster. You can filter and build views in the TMS by Tag to find exactly the Routes you’re looking for, or to see only the Routes assigned to you for monitoring.
Best Practices
Tag for a reason, not for the record. Only create a Tag when it changes planning, execution, or communication. Tags that describe something the system never acts on add noise without adding value.
Keep your Tag names consistent. Decide on a naming convention and reuse it. "2-person" and "two man" splitting the same concept across two Tags will quietly break your rules and filters.
Reuse Tags across Orders. The power of a Tag comes from many Orders sharing it. A Tag used on a single Order rarely justifies itself.
Group related Tags by purpose. Distribution Center, moment of day, vehicle requirement, service level, and communication preference are all different families of Tags. Keeping them distinct makes your Rule Sets easier to reason about.
Review your Tags periodically. Operations change. A Tag that mattered last year may be dead weight now, and a new distinction may deserve one. A short review keeps the list clean.
FAQ
Q: Where do Orders get their Tags?
You can add Tags manually when creating an Order, and you can also have the system apply them automatically. Enrichment Rules can Tag incoming Orders based on their properties (such as address, weight, volume, or order type), so you don’t have to Tag every Order by hand.
Q: Can I use the same Tag across more than one domain?
Yes. A single Tag on an Order can drive Route Planning rules, Proof of Delivery, and Communication all at once. That shared labelling is the whole point.
Q: What happens if an Order has no Tags?
It falls back to default handling. It will be eligible for any planning run it otherwise qualifies for, and it will use the default rules and Task Time. Tagging is how you tell the system to treat an Order differently from the default, so an untagged Order is treated like every other untagged Order.
Key Takeaways
Tags are the shared language that lets Mover treat each Order, Route, and Service the way it deserves. Used well, they split your planning into the right batches, match Orders to the right vehicles and Task Times, route work to the right Carrier, and send recipients the communication they actually want. The discipline that makes them work is simple: tag what changes behavior, name your Tags consistently, and review them as your operation evolves.