Static vs Dynamic Routing for Supercharging Your Delivery Efficiency

Even distributors who make the same deliveries to the same customers every week know that no two delivery runs are really the same—order volumes change, new customers enter the mix, and your transportation network grows and evolves. When your delivery plans don’t evolve to keep up with those changes week in and week out, your route efficiency starts to erode, and it gets harder and harder to turn a profit and keep your customers happy.

Luckily, the days where routing was a Herculean task that could only be performed a few times a year are long gone. Modern route optimization technology makes it easy to adjust existing routes and build new ones from scratch, even when your parameters are complicated and your customers expect consistent delivery service. 

In this post, we’ll cover the whole spread of route optimization tactics—from static and dynamic to hybrids of the two—as well as a rundown of how modern delivery organizations can get more out of their routes and their routing process. 

Key Takeaways:

• Static routes that stay the same from one delivery run to the next may provide stability, but they’re not flexible enough to keep up with changing conditions.
• Modern dynamic routing enables logistics operators to improve route efficiency and get more out of their fleet capacity, even when your routing parameters are complex.
• Distributors who make a mix of new and recurring stops each week can leverage a hybrid of static and dynamic routing to achieve the best of both worlds. 
• Implementing route optimization software requires complete integration with a larger suite for delivery and logistics management capabilities.  

Static vs Dynamic Routing: What’s the Difference?

What Is Static Routing?

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you already know what static routing is: It’s a routing process where drivers take the same delivery routes each day or each week. The order quantities and other details may change, but the routes largely stay the same—often with the same people driving them. 

In a retail context—i.e. for businesses that essentially have a completely new mix of customers each day—a static route may be more of a general route shape that stays the same every delivery run. The same driver makes roughly the same loop starting from the same depot or distribution center, and the only thing that changes are the particulars. 

This was the norm before widespread route optimization software became available for the simple reason that planning routes is complicated and can quickly become time intensive. By keeping routes static, you ensure stability and continuity and you save your team the manual effort of putting routes together. 

This stability can start to fall apart when your routing parameters get more complicated, however. If your customers have specific time window requests or deliveries that require specific skills for installation, you can lose all semblance of efficiency in a hurry. 

Dynamic Routing Defined

Dynamic routing, by contrast, means building a whole set of new routes from scratch each day to fit the exact mix of orders and deliveries you have on tap for a given day. Naturally, this enables you to make sure you’re getting the most out of your fleet by always running the most efficient routes. 

The downside to dynamic route optimization has historically been that optimizing routes takes time and effort, and that for a large enough set of parameters coming up with the most efficient routes is far from guaranteed. So much so that it might not seem entirely worth it to throw time and resources at the problem. 

But modern route optimization software has completely upended this calculus. Now, dynamic route optimization software can give you the power to optimize routes in a matter of minutes—all while accounting for things like driver and asset availability, driver and technician skills, customer requests, etc. 

Suddenly, you have a new path to stability (since the optimized routes will have precise and accurate ETAs) without a huge outlay of time. Simply put, the arguments in favor of static routing vanish when you have powerful enough dynamic route optimization capabilities.   

Is There an Alternative? Hybrid Routing for Distributors

At this point, there’s a certain segment of logistics operators who are shouting at their screens. Food distributors, beverage wholesalers, some kinds of service companies—anyone who makes recurring stops to the same set of customers each week knows that things can be a little less cut and dried when it comes to static vs dynamic routing. 

You can’t create a new route from scratch when half your orders for a given day are customers who expect the same driver to show up at the same time with roughly the same items every Tuesday and Thursday. 

At the same time, you really can’t run the exact same routes every week when the other half of your orders are new or unpredictable. Or, you can (and many distributors do), but you’ll be leaving efficiency on the table. 

This is where hybrid route optimization comes in. By starting with optimized static routes for your high priority recurring orders and then dynamically routing new and smaller orders around them, you can gain the benefits of dynamic route optimization without losing out on the stability and predictability that comes with static routing. 

This is another area where it’s historically been difficult to balance all of the competing priorities and parameters quickly enough to stay flexible, but modern routing software makes this possible—which means that distributors are effectively leaving efficiency on the table by sticking with static routes. 

How to Implement Route Optimization Software

We talk a big game about the power of dynamic route optimization—and with good reason. The right routing capabilities can help you decrease miles driven per stop, reduce driver overtime, get more out of your fleet capacity, and improve customer service by consistently arriving precisely on time. 

But how do you make sure you’re actually set up to get those benefits? In other words, what’s the most effective way to implement dynamic route optimization software to improve your logistics efficiency?

Here are a few key steps to doing that:

• Choose a software vendor that balances functionality and ease of use. Your team should be able to get routes optimized to their exact parameters without spending hours poring over instruction manuals to get there. 
• Integrate routing and delivery management. When you optimize routes in a vacuum, you run the risk that they can’t be executed, or that they aren’t integrated into your customer experience workflows, or that they’re not tracked effectively. To counter this, your route optimization software should have embedded capabilities for the entire delivery management journey. 
• Leverage AI to improve your ETAs. Modern routing software solutions can turn data from previous delivery runs (as well as traffic and weather data from the rest of the web) into AI-powered predictive capabilities that empower you to boost your ETA accuracy by a huge margin. This has significant downstream effects—when your drivers are on time 98% of the time or more, you can boost customer satisfaction and reduce the costs that come with failed or incomplete deliveries.   

Conclusion: Choosing Static vs Dynamic Routing for Your Business

We’ve laid our cards on the table in this piece: we think that dynamic route optimization is table stakes for modern delivery management, and it’s time for logistics operators to start leveraging dynamic routing as a competitive advantage. 

That said, route optimization is just one piece of the delivery management puzzle. If you can find a last mile platform that combines best-in-class route optimization capabilities with features that optimize the last mile logistics journey in its entirety, you’ve got a recipe for increased efficiency and happier customers across the board.