It’s Time to Ditch Manual Routing for Automated Route Planning

Let’s say you could flip a switch and suddenly all of your trucks would be completing at least one more delivery per day and running on-time 98% of the time—how quickly would you jump on it? We’re betting it’d be a matter of seconds.

If you don’t have the right route optimization capabilities, implementing an automated route planning solution is the next best thing to flipping that magical switch. Obviously, implementing new technology is never as simple as that—change management is never a walk in the park, and getting new systems to play nicely with your IT stack can be tricky. But when it comes to automating your route planning and optimization, the results are absolutely worth it. 

Fleet managers are faced with new challenges every single day. Changing customer demands and shorter lead times have made route planning more complex than ever. Balancing competitive service levels and cost-efficient deliveries is a tough job, and the competition is only going to get more aggressive. 

You need to improve delivery performance in all aspects in order to survive and stand out among the competition. But businesses that remain attached to manual route planning are unlikely to see an improvement in the speed, predictability, and accuracy of deliveries.

Fleet managers and owners have to ask themselves some important questions: Is it really possible to plan routes using spreadsheets and still provide customers with realistic and accurate ETAs. Is it cost-effective to assign routes according to the drivers’ preferences?

Here’s a deep dive into the major limitations of manual routing and an explanation of why automated route planning is essential for your business’ success.

Disadvantages of Manual Route Planning

Reduced Fleet Capacity Utilization

The best way to keep costs down is to make sure you’re getting the absolute most out of your fleet. But this is nearly impossible to do if you’re planning routes by hand. In fact, one of the most common complaints from businesses leveraging manual route planning is that they feel like they should be able to keep up with demand using only the trucks and drivers they already have, but somehow they keep having to expand their fleets or rely on contractors. 

There’s a few reasons why this is the case, but it all boils down to the fundamental complexity of creating delivery routes at scale. When you can’t easily visualize the way your truck and driver capacity translates into real deliveries, you can’t optimize your capacity utilization.

At the same time, your routing and dispatching team won’t be able to work quickly without the right tools—meaning that even in cases where they can build out efficient routes, they won’t be able to do so quickly enough to manage last minute requests. 

Customer Churn

Simply put, customers want on-time deliveries. It’s hard to retain loyal customers if you cannot deliver quickly or constantly miss customers’ preferred time windows. It’s also hard to win new clients when you can’t show prospective customers that you’re capable of sticking to agreed delivery timeframes. 

Unfortunately, manual route planning can’t help you on this front. There are too many factors that directly impact delivery ETAs, and manual planning can’t account for them all consistently. The result is late deliveries and dissatisfied customers. 

Reduced Profits

It’s no secret that it’s hard to scale without the right tools. And automatic route planning definitely falls into that category—since it’s the most reliable way to gain visibility into and control over your delivery capacity 

Sure, you can always add more drivers and vehicles to your fleet as you grow your business, but are the additions necessary? Purchasing vehicles and hiring more drivers means higher operating costs, which can eat into whatever profits you were hoping to gain from increased demand.

Business expansion without an efficient route planner can lead to chaos. Your dispatch team has to grapple with a larger volume of orders, drivers, and vehicles, while manually plotting the best routes and assigning drivers to delivery points—all of which is a recipe for inefficiency and delays.  

Why Automated Route Planning Is Key to Operational Excellence

There are many factors involved in determining the most optimal routes: truck and driver availability, customer locations, dock restriction, delivery times, and maintenance schedules, the list goes on. Manual route planning makes it nearly impossible to factor in all these variables, but automated route planning software can. This means drivers can take the most optimal routes to ensure efficiency and accuracy in their deliveries.

You could have years of experience in manually planning and tracking routes, but you can only deal with so much information all at once. By contrast, a sophisticated route planning solution can deal with hundreds or thousands of delivery points, drivers, and variables all at once without getting bogged down or becoming inefficient. 

Providing drivers with efficient routes every single day helps you cut down on fuel costs and driver hours, which contribute to the two largest costs in a typical last mile operation. Likewise, less distance traveled by the vehicles means saving on vehicle maintenance costs.

Automated route planning is essential in ensuring loyal customers and acquiring new ones. A sophisticated route planner enables faster delivery times and more accurate delivery windows. Dispatchers can make last-minute changes as needed without going back to the drawing board, helping your team avoid costly missed deliveries. 

The result is a seamless customer experience that generates positive feedback.

Here, one of the keys is leveraging your route planning and optimization process to generate accurate delivery ETAs for every stop on every route. Again, this is something that’s too complex to do effectively by hand, which is why it’s crucial to automate the process by leveraging Ai and machine learning to turn data from past deliveries into insights about future performance. 

The Way Forward: Automatic Route Planning with AI

An AI-powered routing solution can consider all of the variables we discussed above—in addition to things like historical traffic patterns, differences in driver speed and skill, service time variables for different service/product types, historical traffic patterns, and much—and use it to not just create efficient delivery routes, but to assign all the stops on those routes ETAs that are highly accurate and precise.  

This does more than just increase efficiency—it also increases customer satisfaction. No one likes receiving late deliveries (in fact, many consumers don’t like early deliveries either). And when you miss your time window, you’re much more likely to find that the customer isn’t at home to accept the delivery at all—resulting in frustration on both sides and significant redelivery costs. 

By contrast, when you make time window promises and actually deliver on them, you can earn the trust—and repeat business—of your customers, all while preventing the frustration that comes from timing-related delivery snafus. When you can automatically make this kind of precision and accuracy a reality, it can have a huge impact on your business. 

There are hundreds of variables that need to be factored into route plans—and not even the most seasoned dispatchers or planners can account for all of them without help. With an AI-powered automated route planning solution, you can cut through the complexity to create efficient routes in minutes. Your dispatchers, drivers, and customers will thank you for it.