Transition with Ease: Moving from Roadnet to DispatchTrack

Most businesses have different needs than they did a decade ago. Not only has the state of last mile delivery changed considerably in recent years—thanks to ratcheting customer expectations and new supply chain realities—but the technology that businesses have at their fingertips has evolved considerably. It wasn’t too long ago that the idea of equipping every delivery driver with a mobile phone in order to check orders and capture proof of delivery seemed far-fetched. Now, the idea of a driver without a mobile device would raise more than a few eyebrows.

Though the transition has happened a little more slowly, the question of cloud vs on-prem technology deployments has been trending in the same direction around digital vs paper proof of delivery. Running on-premise software for last mile solutions still isn’t uncommon, the virtues of SaaS-native technology deployments have been well demonstrated and cloud solutions deployments are increasingly taken for granted in logistics. 

So where does that leave longtime users of systems like Roadnet? Are they stuck deciding between running a barely-supported, outdated on-premise routing solution and a painful, disruptive, and expensive transition to the cloud in the form of Roadnet Anywhere? 

Thankfully, the answer is “no.” A painless transition to SaaS routing and delivery management is possible—as long as you can find the right technology partner.  

DispatchTrack vs Roadnet

For a number of industries, Roadnet has been one of the most widely-used route and territory management solutions for a number of years. Food distributors, beverage wholesalers, and others continue to use it to generate sales territories based on their customer mixes and distribution networks, as well as to create delivery routes for actual daily and weekly delivery needs. These deployments tend to be on-premise, but following a spate of acquisitions Roadnet’s support for these on-premise deployments has become much less cohesive. 

This state of affairs puts most Roadnet users in a position where, on the surface, they can choose between continuing to run their on-premise software or transitioning to Roadnet’s newer cloud modules. 

DispatchTrack, on the other hand, is a SaaS-native platform that’s spent the last 10 years making fast, scalable, highly-connected cloud technology a real option for business across verticals. Because our technology has been built in the cloud from day one—all on company-owned IP—the platform has continued to evolve without disruptions. We’re able to offer high uptime and round-the-clock support while constantly innovating to make sure our customers have the capabilities they need to succeed in the modern delivery environment. 

Essentially, DispatchTrack deployments are a reliable way of future-proofing route optimization, territory planning, and delivery management processes. Updates are taken care of behind the scenes so that our customers never have to worry about changing security best practices, infrastructure changes, or other maintenance issues—at the same time, they’ll never be forced to migrate in order to receive support. 

Why Transition to DispatchTrack?

At a high level, there are three big reasons to transition from Roadnet to DispatchTrack: ease-of-use, speed, and ease-of-migration. 

Ease-of-use:

Simply put, DispatchTrack is designed to make life easier for route and territory planners. Rather than requiring binders full of codes or outside specialists to build a new plan, DispatchTrack gives you the capabilities to generate and optimize plans in a matter of minutes. When it comes to territory optimization, planners can upload their existing territory plans, input a few parameters, and let the system work its magic to boost route efficiency by 10%+. 

When plans have to be adjusted by hand, the system makes it easy to perform tweaks and make changes without losing efficiency. When it comes to routing, the user experience is just as streamlined—we even integrate territory planning and routing so that you’re not constantly moving plans from one platform to another in order to turn territory plans into workable daily routes. 

Speed:

Because of DispatchTrack’s scalable cloud architecture, processes that might take hours running on in-house servers can be completed in minutes or seconds. From adding your stops and parameters and clicking the “auto route” button to calculating an efficient delivery route that accounts for time window requirements, traffic, driver affinity, etc. is a matter of less than a minute. Even optimizing an entire sales or delivery territory (including the route plans that will result from those territories) takes the system only a few minutes, with rapid recalculations when adjustments are made. 

This isn’t just a gimmick. It can transform the way you plan and execute deliveries. Instead of rerouting a few times a year, DispatchTrack enables you to reroute as often as you need to. This means that you can respond efficiently even to smaller changes that you might just have eyeballed in the past. The result is that you’re always running the most efficient routes, thereby keeping costs down and boosting your customer service. And it’s the same with territory planning—you can even simply test out new potential territories and compare the potential costs on the fly. 

Ease-of-migration

DispatchTrack’s platform is architected for easy implementation and total connectivity. Most new customers are up and running within a few weeks—and we’ve even performed some time-sensitive migrations more quickly than that. Training new users doesn’t take much time, which means we’re able to quickly empower teams to configure their instances to their needs and get the entire team up to speed. Once we’ve got your delivery data, the rest is easy. 

At the same time, our open API makes it easy to integrate your DispatchTrack instance with your ERP, PoS, or any other enterprise solutions you may be using. This, combined with the fact that our solution combines territory planning, routing, visibility, customer communication, and more into a single streamlined solution, sets you up for a smooth transition. The best part? There’s no need to shell out for costly implementation consultants.  

How to Easily Implement DispatchTrack as a Roadnet User

At this point you might be thinking, “that’s all well and good in theory, but what does transitioning from Roadnet to DispatchTrack look like in practice?” For starters, following a demo and consultation with one of our delivery technology experts, we generally create a live DispatchTrack environment so you can test out what your world would be like with DispatchTrack. You give us your delivery data, and from there we create a fully-functional instance where you can create plans and routes using real-life data. You can see how all of your current workflows and data streams map onto DispatchTrack’s platform and see for yourself all the ways in which our platform can make life easier and deliveries more efficient. Once you’ve had the chance to test drive a live environment, we deliver a value report to you to show all the ways DispatchTrack could power savings for you. 

If you like what you see, the process of actually shifting over to DispatchTrack isn’t too different. We’ll work with you to get your other systems (e.g. VIP or Encompass) integrated with DispatchTrack so that data can be easily shared between systems. We configure your instance to your specifications, and then offer trainings to get your users up to speed quickly. Within a matter of weeks, you’re up and running and boosting your delivery efficiency across the board. 

To learn more, you can check out our Roadnet migration guide.