The standard for route optimization technology only gets better every year—which is lucky, because the challenges faced by delivery organizations aren’t getting any easier. Intelligent delivery routing can help businesses across the board to reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, and improve their overall logistics performance—regardless of what industry they’re working in.
Gone are the days when delivery route optimization software was only really tailored to retail use cases. Today, even industries that don’t think of routing or route optimization as primary areas for strategic improvement can benefit significantly from the right routing solution.
Optimizing routes is about ensuring efficient and cost-effective routes for drivers to follow to each delivery point. Effective route optimization enables businesses to make the most of their resources and ensure timely deliveries. In planning routes, you need to take into consideration various factors such as time window parameters, driver availability and schedules, service time estimates, and real-world traffic and weather conditions.
But legacy forms of route planning, regardless of your business or industry, can be both cumbersome and costly. This is why many businesses are investing in the right tools so they can save money and time and achieve higher customer satisfaction.
When you’re delivering building supplies to job sites, you often have to coordinate with busy schedules. At the same time, the demand for same-day and next-day deliveries is huge, which means your routing lead times need to be quite short and your delivery process needs to be agile.
The right delivery route optimization software can speed up route planning and simplify scheduling so that it’s easy to slot orders into existing job site schedules as soon as the customer’s request comes through. This is possible because of modern SaaS- and AI-powered capabilities that improve ETA accuracy and ensure rapid route optimization at scale.
The result is that your customers can get reliable service without creating chaos for your logistics operations. As a bonus, the right software can make it easier to resolve delivery locations for sites that don’t have addresses yet and help you capture proof of delivery at chaotic job sites where the person receiving the order may not have been the one who placed it.
Big and bulky retail is one one of the classic use cases for modern route optimization software. Since these are typically scheduled deliveries, they can’t be routed as easily as parcel deliveries that can show up at any point during the day.
Here, managing capacity and ensuring on-time deliveries are the key benefits. Delivery route optimization software makes it possible to narrow the time windows you’re offering customers from significantly—e.g. from 6 hours to 2 hours. It also makes it possible to route based on driver skill level, so that you’re reserving skilled technicians for jobs that actually require them, e.g. complex installations.
On top of all that, the right routing platform can give you the tools to let customers choose their own delivery time slots from dynamically generated options based on your parameters. This decreases the odds of a customer-not-at-home situation without decreasing your overall delivery efficiency.
Field service companies covering a large geographic area with multiple service teams on the road can use route optimization software to tackle the complexity of their delivery constraints. These businesses cannot afford to depend on conventional routing processes, as they also have to deal with industry-specific needs like licensing requirements and state regulations, and adding manual route planning into the mix requires a ton of time and resources that the company may not have. This is why field service companies have traditionally leveraged numerous employees for planning a month's worth of field visits.
With route optimization software, these companies will need fewer person-hours to plan their field teams' visits, since their planners simply need to import their order lists, upload them into the software, and compare different potential route plans. You can then set the route plans as well as automatically assign the best-suited technicians or field service teams for each job according to various factors like skills required, state licensing and regulation, and territory capacity. Here, the software should also consider other factors such as traffic issues, customer-requested service windows, and lunch breaks.
Field service companies that invest in delivery route optimization software can reap serious benefits. These include improved scalability, since they can potentially bring in more clients, and cost savings, since they can cut down the number of miles driven and resources required for each route.
The right route optimization software can also be of great help to food distributors—especially since these businesses often face industry-specific challenges such as food and product spoilage, special handling and refrigeration needs, and tight regulations due to food safety issues. Most food distributors are operating on low margins and stiff competition, so any tools that can decrease costs and improve customer service have the potential to be incredibly impactful.
Food and beverage businesses benefit from the route planning software in multiple ways. First, the solution can calculate order durations by using historical data to automatically and accurately plan routes and schedules. This might involve finding ways to deliver more per day without risking late deliveries to top customers, or it might involve leverage what-if scenarios to look for more efficient ways to service clients.
In this way, those engaged in food distribution can enjoy increased profit per vehicle or driver and higher revenues. These companies can expand their business faster as the dispatch and planning teams can focus on other high-value tasks rather than spend long hours matching drivers to jobs manually tweaking routes. With the right delivery software (i.e. something that leverages AI and machine learning to improve ETA accuracy), food and beverage businesses can also increase their on-time delivery rates significantly.
If you're still relying on manual scheduling and planning, then it's time to consider investing in route optimization solutions.
High fuel bills and drivers' salaries that eat up a large chunk of the revenues. But manual planning and dispatching also limit your company's ability to make changes on the fly as needed. Plus, a lack of automation can end in missed and delayed deliveries, which results in unhappy customers.
Reducing operating costs requires ensuring that teams are working as efficiently as possible. The right solution enables companies to maximize their resources, allowing each driver to either complete more service calls or deliver more orders—all while driving fewer miles. This cuts down the fuel bill, which accounts for a big part of a fleet's operating costs.
Many times, businesses either acquire more vehicles and add more drivers or spend numerous hours organizing and reorganizing schedules, routes, and networks in a bid to scale their operations. With routing software, you can scale your business without necessarily having to add to your existing resources (e.g. by getting more out of your existing capacity). You can reduce the planning time from hours to minutes, which enables you to run what-if scenarios much more quickly.
There is a shortage of commercial drivers, which is why the transportation industry has been listing driver retention as one of their main concerns year after year. Luckily, the right route planning software helps you spread the workload evenly across your whole fleet to ensure that drivers enjoy a work-life balance. By the same token, when you empower drivers with plans that are actually workable and efficient, they’re likely to experience less frustration while completing more deliveries—which in turn might translate into higher pay for them.
Consumers are now demanding more from businesses. They want to have the ability to track their orders in real-time, receive reliable expected times of arrival (ETAs), and get updates via SMS or email ahead of deliveries. Delivery route optimization solutions can help businesses meet the modern customer's expectations by offering live tracking options, accurate ETAs, and real-time updates to customers to avoid missed or delayed deliveries and to increase customer satisfaction.
If you’re still using conventional ways to dispatch and route drivers and service technicians, then it’s time to invest in delivery route optimization software. The right delivery routing tool can help you maximize resources, save time and money, retain drivers, increase revenue, and ultimately improve your bottom line.
DispatchTrack is the global leader in delivery management software. We offer AI-powered route optimization that’s built to handle a wide variety of use cases—and our customers regularly see huge reductions in time spent routing and huge increases in delivery efficiency.
To start seeing the routing benefits that we’ve sketched out above, reach out to our team today and schedule a consultation.