There are some things that shouldn’t be automated: meetings with important clients, managing employees, long-term strategic thinking about your business. But there are plenty of things that, especially in 2025, really should be—and we’d argue that route planning should absolutely be in that category.
Don’t get us wrong, we’re not suggesting that you can remove human planners from the routing process entirely—there would be huge and obvious downsides to doing so in most cases. But when it comes to the matter of actually turning a set of orders, parameters, customer requirements, and scheduling considerations into an efficient sequence of stops, no one should be attempting to do it all by hand.
Luckily, the route optimization technology is out there that can help you automate the right parts of the routing process. Dispatchers and routers can generate delivery routes with the click of a button and automatically dispatch those routes to drivers and generate accurate delivery ETAs.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this can have a transformative impact on your last mile delivery operations.
Here's how truck routing software can maximize operational efficiency so your business can maintain profit margins and keep customers happy:
Route optimization is the process of finding the optimal routes for every delivery truck driver on every delivery run. In short, it's how businesses attempt to achieve both delivery speed and cost-effectiveness.
There's a common misconception that route optimization always focuses on the shortest distance. In fact, route optimization is more about cutting down the driving time per assignment for all drivers in the fleet—it’s really about serving your customers in the way that works best for your business.
What does this mean in practice? For starters, it means being able to incorporate customer requests and requirements into the routing process. Unfortunately, once you’ve added a few individual time window requests into the mix, the efficiency of an entire route can fall apart.
Similarly, your routing process needs to account for the fact that there’s often a right or wrong vehicle—or even a right or wrong driver—for a given job. You don’t want to send a highly skilled technician to drop off a parcel while your most junior team member is trying to install a new washer and dryer in someone’s condo.
The best route planning process is the one that can handle all of these complexities without coming apart at the seams.
Some businesses are still relying on manual route planning rather than investing in route optimization software. Usually that’s because change management is difficult and sourcing a new solution might feel like too daunting of a task—but the end result is the same: higher delivery costs and worse capacity utilization.
Fleet owners and operators must keep in mind that even the most seasoned route planners cannot compete with the computing abilities of intelligent route optimization software. Human planners can’t handle all of the complexities that come with the last mile without a little help—but the right solution gives planners the ability to codify their domain knowledge to create routes that are actually efficient in a matter of minutes.
Route optimization software is a must-have for trucking businesses that want to improve their operational efficiency. By cutting out waste in daily shipping routes, it helps you save time and resources, bring down operational costs, and increase revenues.
Here’s what a sophisticated automatic route planner can offer:
Automatic route optimization software eliminates printed, manually plotted routes, instead offering digital maps with turn-by-turn directions, making it easy for drivers to follow the planned routes. Plus, your automatic route planner can help you make adjustments in real time when there are unexpected road conditions that can delay delivery schedules. The solution is responsible for providing turn by turn navigation and offering delivery notes and context to drivers as needed, which means drivers don't have to spend time fussing with their own truck route navigation apps or calling in to dispatchers for guidance.
The right route planner also dispatches drivers automatically, eliminating the need for drivers to spend a substantial amount of time discussing assignments for the day with their managers or dispatchers—and a substantial amount of paper printing out those assignments
Truck routing tools don't just provide the most optimal routes or automate driver assignments. They also offer operators and managers a way of determining the problematic areas of their delivery operations.
Dispatchers and managers can track a host of different metrics using route planners, from on-time rates, service times, successful deliveries, and idle time to missed deliveries and customer satisfaction rating—with the result being that it’s easier to get a handle on what’s actually going in delivery processes that might otherwise be fairly opaque.
Fuel expenses are usually some of the biggest overhead costs for delivery businesses. Luckily, the right route planner for trucks cuts down on this expense significantly.
How? By finding the best routes so drivers won't be spending unnecessary time and mileage. Crucially, this means generating routes that actually work for your customers and that are realistic enough that your drivers can execute on them—otherwise the best routes in the world won’t translate into cost-effective realities.
Automatic route planning software increases productivity for the entire delivery team. Route planners who manually plot routes can instead find the optimal routes in just a matter of minutes, saving them valuable person-hours. Likewise, the dispatch team no longer has to spend time printing assignments.
Route planning solutions also reduce mileage per delivery, which means drivers can complete more deliveries every day. This increased vehicle utilization enables you to get more out of your existing delivery capacity.
Last-mile deliveries have a gargantuan impact on customer satisfaction. Delayed deliveries due to operational inefficiencies tend to cause low ratings from the customers—but because the last mile is so difficult to manage, late deliveries and low customer satisfaction often seems inevitable.
With an automatic route planner, however, you can meet delivery time windows consistently. The right solution will also have in-built customer experience tools, so that you can notify customers ahead of time if delivery windows are going to be missed due to unpredictable circumstances. This can be enhanced even further with real-time tracking capabilities, providing both the customer and business an accurate ETA. This feature, in turn, helps in managing the customer's expectations while also making them feel more empowered throughout the entire delivery process.
Delivery businesses are facing more challenges than ever these days, particularly with increasing cost per mile and significant volatility in the marketplace. Fortunately, there are solutions—such as the right route optimization solution—that can help significantly increase productivity while lowering overhead costs.
No delivery route unfolds in a vacuum. Your routes sit in the middle of a complicated last mile delivery process with more moving parts than you can track. Getting one piece right isn’t enough—you need to get the entire last mile right. When you have route optimization capabilities that are connected, agile, and intelligent, that becomes much easier to achieve.