According to a new study, the route optimization market is expected to see steady growth from 2025 to 2032—meaning more and more delivery businesses will be adopting delivery route planners, and more and more software providers will be trying to leverage cutting-edge technology to improve route performance and capture market share.
In one sense, this is a good thing for all involved. Delivery route optimization is a notoriously thorny problem, and as more businesses are positioned to tackle it head on, overall delivery efficiency will increase across the board. This means fewer hours on the road, less fuel usage, and happier customers.
The flip side is that as the market grows it becomes potentially harder to separate the wheat from the chaff and find the right solution for your business. After all, the best route optimization software is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re delivering pallets of lumber to busy job sites or installing washing machines in people’s homes, your idea of the perfect app is going to be very different from someone who’s trying to get a few stops routed for one truck.
That means that whichever boat you happen to be in, separating out the solutions that are right for your business can be a challenge. Delivery route planning is difficult enough as it is—you want to make sure you have the right capabilities to get the job done without fussing with technology that’s not designed for your use case.
Key Takeaways:
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To figure out the best delivery route app for your business, you first need to ask yourself: “what’s my delivery routing use case?”
In other words, how does a piece of delivery route planning software need to support you in order to ensure that your delivery routes will work for your business?
Here are a few different use cases that might apply to your business:
Some businesses will only have to grapple with the simplest of these use cases—others will have a host of different ones to deal with. The trick is to match the use case to the right routing software provider.
The best route optimization software is the one that actually covers your use cases. So, we’ll lay all of these out with the caveat that not all of them will apply to all use cases. That being said, if you’re dealing with any of the more complex challenges that we outlined above, it’s more than likely that these features will be must-haves for whatever routing software you choose.
The AI hype isn’t really dying down—which means that it’s easy to lose track of the very real, very practical applications that AI already has in delivery and logistics. Route optimization is a case in point. For several years now, the cutting edge routing solutions on the market have leveraged AI and machine learning to significantly increase the accuracy of their ETAs and the efficiency of their routes. If ETAs matter to your particular business, the best delivery route planner app will be one that incorporates AI and machine learning.
The last thing you want during the holiday capacity crunch is for your routing engine to slow to a crawl. Unfortunately, there’s a real risk of that happening when your routing platform is built (and implemented!) to scale. In practice, the best way to avoid slowdown and other growing pains is to look for a SaaS solution with a track record of seamlessly handling huge order volumes. Even if you’re only routing 10 trucks today, next year you might be doing double that—which means that an on-premise solution would hamper your ability to handle orders. A legacy solution, even one that’s ostensibly cloud-based, could cause the same issues.
Just because your routing use case is incredibly complex doesn’t mean the best delivery route planner app for your business is the most complicated one. If you’re constantly consulting binders of information in order to figure out how to get the routes to work for your drivers in reality—rather than just being nice and efficient in theory—then you’re inevitably going to be spending prohibitive amounts of time on your routing processes. The best route optimization software will actually save you time.
This includes situations where human planners are making adjustments to system-generated routes. You don’t want to be in a situation where your team can’t make small adjustments to routes without those routes completely falling apart and losing efficiency.
Frankly, there’s a lot more in-the-weeds routing needs that you could mention in this bullet point, but the main point here is that you want the flexibility to build routes in a way that works for you—without losing efficiency.
The default for most route optimization solutions assumes that your trucks are leaving the warehouse at the beginning of the day with a full load and coming back empty at the end of the day. But anyone who deals with the inherent messiness of last mile logistics knows that that’s not always the way it goes, and you may need to plan routes that involve returning to the warehouse in the middle of the run, processing returns and backhauls, and any number of other things that make the logistics world turn.
Your route optimization software should do more than just support these—it should make it easy for users to get them right and ensure the most efficient routes, no matter how many parameters you throw at them.
Sometimes, you really need the right vehicle—or the right driver, technician, equipment, you name it—for the job. When that happens, there’s no substitute for being able to automatically match orders to the right vehicles, drivers, etc.
By the same token, there’s no substitute for not having to worry that you’ve overloaded a particular asset or route. That’s why automated capacity matching is such a time saver when it comes to planning routes.
This kind of functionality will obviously be more valuable for businesses that offer a wider variety of services or products, but your software’s ability to handle diverse use cases without a herculean effort will simultaneously make life easier across the board while giving you built in flexibility as your business grows and evolves.
The most effective route optimization solution is the one that’s fully connected and integrated within your logistics processes. This idea runs counter to the thinking of a lot of old-school deployments that prioritize a separate software solution that’s just for routing.
But as customer experience has become more of a focal point, it’s become more and more obvious that routing is an integral part of keeping customers happy with efficient order fulfillment—as such, it should live in the same solution that helps you manage the rest of your last mile and delivery management operations.
In practice, this means that when you’re hunting for the best route optimization software you may really be hunting for the best delivery management software. Regardless of what it says on the tin, you’ll get the best results if you implement software that gives you capabilities for route optimization that are fully integrated into your capabilities for tracking and visibility, customer engagement, driver management, and beyond.
Why is this so important? Because your routes determine whether you’ll be able to get customers their orders quickly and at the right time. AI-powered routing can provide 98% ETA accuracy, but that’s only valuable if the ETA is communicated to the customer and actually works for them.
By the same token, the most effective routes are the ones that your drivers can actually complete as scheduled—with an integrated approach, you can make sure that’s exactly what happens.
At DispatchTrack, our goal is to support a wide variety of route optimization use cases in a way that’s seamless, scalable, and user-friendly. We support a host of different route optimization use cases seamlessly and natively, including hybrid static-dynamic routing. That’s how we’ve been able to help so many delivery businesses improve route efficiency and delight their customers.
Our route optimization engine is powered by tried-and-tested AI and machine learning capabilities, meaning that the system can rapidly turn even the most complex set of parameters and requirements into efficient, workable delivery routes in a matter of minutes.
Numerous clients of ours have achieved 50% decreases in time spent routing, resulting in reduced delivery costs, improved performance, and happier customers —> read their stories here.
If you’re interested in learning more about how the best delivery route planner app can save your business time and money—regardless of use case—reach out to one of our experts to learn more.