How an Efficient Route Planner Reduces Delivery Costs

Manual route planning is time-consuming, and it can be challenging enough for human planners to work with a few delivery vehicles and low order volumes. Add in complex routes, differing driver skill levels, and varying time window requests and manual planning can turn into chaos. That’s why it’s virtually impossible to rapidly and accurately calculate routes and meet promised delivery times without an efficient delivery route planner.

In spite of this fact, many fleet operators rely on legacy technology for planning routes. These companies often deal with irate customers as a result of failing to hit delivery time windows consistently. Legacy route planners tend to be slow in making calculations, and they have difficulty factoring in all of the different elements that impact delivery times—the result is inefficient routing and inaccurate time window estimates.  

To stay competitive in the modern last mile, you need to optimize routes effectively to manage your fleet efficiently. This means rapidly factoring in real-time variables, prioritizing stops, managing time constraints, and matching the right drivers to the right jobs without missing a beat.

In this article, we'll take a look at some of the usual bottlenecks affecting route planning and how an efficient route planner can save your company both time and money.

The Top Challenges in Route Planning

Manual route planning is inefficient and time-consuming even for small businesses. Route planning and optimization challenges may vary depending on the business's size, but the same fundamental challenges apply in most situations. 

Factoring in Complex Variables

Even for a relatively straightforward routing use case like delivery appliances, you still have to grapple with customer time window requests, vehicle capacity restrictions, driver speed and availability, and numerous other variables. 

As you start to talk about installations, services, and recurring deliveries, there are even more variables to factor in:

• Customer driver affinity
• Differences in service time
• Driver skill levels
• Delivery frequencies and off-day orders
• Coordination with job site schedules 

Simply put, the parameters can add up so quickly that effective route planning can grind to a halt. When you can’t easily work around your routing constraints—which, less face, you really can’t if you don’t have the right tool—then you’re stuck with “good enough” routes at best and unworkable ones at worst. 

Building Routes to Execute

It's not only planners that experience difficulty with delivery routes. Drivers are the ones who actually have to execute on these routes, and if they’re not set up for success then they’ll have real challenges to overcome on a daily basis: 

• Having to use disparate systems in their daily routines such as messaging apps, paper proof of delivery, or a stand-alone proof of delivery solutions and delivery lists
• Driving through routes that are far from optimal, which can cause overlaps, backtracking, and delays
• Using a complex built-navigation interface or relying on both the driver assignment printout and their preferred navigational apps like Waze, Google Maps, or Apple Maps
• Constantly running behind and doing damage control because meeting the given ETAs is nearly impossible

Lack of Visibility on Drivers

Without modern delivery management technology, fleet managers or dispatchers have to message or call their drivers to know their actual location and then have to relay this information either directly to the customer or the customer service team.

Additionally, the customer team has to deal with customers who don’t have up-to-date delivery info or reliable ETAs. Ideally, your ETAs would update as your drivers go along—but if you lack visibility into driver workflows, this can be difficult or impossible. 

Poor Scalability

Manual and legacy routing workflows can make it difficult to scale routing efforts up or down as needed. Since the routing process is so time consuming to begin with, there may be no way to keep up with demand if there’s a sudden spike in order volumes. Simply put, you need both a scalable process (i.e. a digitized one) and scalable architecture (i.e. a SaaS solution).

Knowing these bottlenecks should help you appreciate the value of having an efficient delivery route planner app—one that enables you to improve the operational efficiency of their delivery operations. 

How an Efficient Route Planner Helps You Reduce Delivery Costs

An effective  route planning software solution can find the shortest routes in a matter of minutes. It can handle optimized route planning for fleet operations with large delivery volumes and complex constraints. How does this impact costs? We’re glad you asked...

Customization and Flexibility

The right solution allows users to identify and customize their delivery constraints and input them into the system as needed. Each business is unique, and they all have their own set of requirements and challenges. This might include routing to ensure certain priority drop-offs and delivery time frames while still providing the most efficient stops and routes. Or it might mean routing around an existing set of recurring stops if you’re working in a B2B delivery context.

AI and Machine Learning

For a truly efficient route planner, you should seek out something that learns from previous deliveries. This is possible with solutions that offer AI and machine learning based functionality out of the box. When your routing solution learns from the outcomes of previous routes and deliveries, you can create better routes and more accurate ETAs. Again, this is a function of accounting for more variables than a human planner can really grapple with, from regional effects to different load and vehicle types to driver skill level and service time. 

Scalability

Of course, efficiency isn’t just about the routes that are being put out. It’s also a matter of how quickly those routes can be calculated and adjusted—especially in periods where order volumes might be fluctuating. To empower rapid route optimization, most businesses need a cloud-based solution that can scale computing power up or down as needed. This is something that legacy software, by definition, can’t provide. Really, what you need here is scalable SaaS architecture. 

Complete Visibility

Traditional route planning makes life harder for fleet managers, since they can't see where their drivers are in the moment. The right solution offers fleet managers complete visibility on their delivery teams, allowing them to locate them at any time. Having complete visibility on drivers on the road allows companies to manage their resources more effectively, cuts down on operating costs, and provides customers with accurate ETAs on the day of delivery. 

Improved Customer Experience

Great customer delivery experience doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of a lot of different things going right—up to and including the driver showing up at the delivery site at just the right time. The most efficient route planner helps you accomplish that consistently, resulting in happier customers and smoother delivery operations overall.

This doesn’t just save you money in customer acquisition costs (and we all know that acquiring a new customer is much more expensive than retaining an old one), it also saves you money in the form of miles driven. When your drivers are empowered to show up at the right time, the customer is much less likely to miss the delivery—meaning many fewer redelivery attempts. 

This means fewer scenarios where you’re effectively doubling your delivery costs, as well as a reduction in the likelihood of items getting lost or damaged in transit. 

Discover the Most Efficient Route Planner for Your Last Mile

Route optimization continues to be a crucial piece of the last mile logistics puzzle, and finding the most efficient route planner for your organization is increasingly key to ongoing success. 

When it comes to choosing the right routing solution, it’s not just about features and functionality—it’s also about finding a true partner with a technology solution that will support your entire logistics process from end to end. Look for someone with a strong track record of successful implementations, a history of innovation, and roadmap that shows how they’ll continue to support your last mile logistics process well into the future.