Food distribution, beer wholesaling, field service scheduling, and other businesses that live and die by regular, recurring orders face a lot of day-to-day challenges around routing and delivery management. But one of the most common challenges we encounter when working with these businesses is that their sales territories are a mess.
One of the reasons that territory planning is prone to this kind of challenge is that the actual planning process is too slow and complex—at least when you’re using legacy technology. We’ve gone over that in blog posts in the past, so today we’ll focus on a less obvious challenge: disconnect between territory planning and routing.
Territory planning is a complex process. You need to account for a host of different factors—from site-specific customer requirements to time window preferences to driver/sales rep affinity to revenue balance between sellers—all of which exponentially increase the number of possible territory configurations.
Once you’ve divided accounts into territories, you’re not even close to finished—because these territories need to actually work when they’re translated into weekly and daily routes. For a lot of planners, this is where the process gets really frustrating.
Your territory planning solution spits out a set of sales territories, which you then have to manually move into your routing solution to create routes for your drivers/sellers. When those routes aren’t feasible or there’s no way to make sure you’re actually visiting every client at the right time, you have to go back to your territory planning solution and try to finagle the territories to resolve whatever issue you’re running. Then you have to repeat step 2 and hope that this time the territory planning solution has actually created something you can use. If it hasn’t, you have to keep repeating this cycle over and over again until you have a plan that actually works.
Territory planning and route optimization are difficult enough on their own. When you have to navigate this chasm of finicky manual effort between processes, the challenge only multiplies. The result is incredible frustration for the planners who have to navigate these systems, the sellers who have to work with these inefficient plans, and the customers who wonder why their distributors, wholesaler, linen delivery provider, etc. can’t accommodate new requests.
The problem we described above might seem intractable. But some of the struggle vanishes when you’re able to run territory plans and optimize routes within a matter of minutes, rather than hours or days.
Why does this make a big difference? There are a couple of reasons:
It’s easy enough to imagine the ways in which this might take some of the pain out of the process. At the same time, your planners are still stuck as the manual intermediary between two processes that are effectively siloed.
That’s why the real solution is to plan routes and territories simultaneously within the same solution.
By planning routes and territories within the same solution, you can solve the problems we’ve been sketching out over the course of this article. Rather than laboriously exporting and important territory plans and route plans, you can generate them within the same system to create streamlined, intelligent, user-friendly workflows.
How does this work in practice? You might expect a process like this one:
Sure, that process may have a fair number of steps as we’ve broken it out here—but that’s really just to illustrate the ways that routing and territory planning naturally intersect. When you can combine them into a single system, many of these steps fade into the background. And when you combine them in a single system that’s fast, powerful, and intelligent, you make life a lot better for planners, drivers, and customers. Best of all, you make it easier to ensure great customer service and efficient cost-to-serve—even as business conditions evolve.