Pop quiz: Are you currently using or planning to use on-premises software for your company's truck router? If your answer is yes, you may be setting yourself up for future disruptions.
Cloud computing continues to evolve, and many industries are ditching their legacy software and moving to the cloud, especially now that AI is making its presence felt and business leaders feel that they need to get their data into more usable forms to take advantage.
The logistics industry certainly isn’t immune here—in fact, it’s one of the areas where cloud-based technology has made a huge impact in the past several years. Why? Because running your logistics software in the cloud gives you significant added flexibility and adaptability, it increases connectivity, and it helps you grow your capabilities as your business needs evolve.
This is especially true when it comes to truck routers. These are systems that need to handle huge quantities of data and perform complex calculations—all using highly up-to-date mapping data, traffic information, and more. Maintaining all of the in-house can be a challenge at the best of times.
In this post, we’ll dive deeper into the many reasons that cloud-based route optimization technology is an increasing necessity in modern last mile logistics, and the benefits of switching away from on-premise solutions.
Limited access to your route planning software makes scheduling, routing, monitoring, and managing deliveries more difficult and less efficient. With on-premises deployments, it’s all too common to run into access issues around physical server locations—and that’s even before you think about downtime, which tends to be much lower in the cloud these days.
This extends not just to things like dispatching and routing, but also to providing up-to-date information for your customers and drivers. On-premise systems are prone to silos and don’t facilitate rapid sharing of data—which means that pushing the latest optimized route to drivers isn’t easy, and staying in touch with customers can be virtually impossible.
In the past few years, businesses relying on cloud-based solutions have been able to adapt better to the quick changes needed in their workflows brought by all of the upheaval.
Why? Because cloud technology—the right cloud technology, anyway—is designed to be scalable. That means that when there’s a dramatic swing in demand, you’re able to up your routing capacity without adding new servers (something that simply wouldn’t be feasible to do in time for the holiday sales rush, for instance). And, to be sure, the ability to dynamically optimize routes is one of the best tools you can leverage around demand volatility.
Even outside of volatility and uncertainty, businesses often need to scale to accommodate business growth—this is, simply put, much easier in the cloud.
Your cloud-based dynamic route planning software vendor can provide better ongoing service and support than all but the most robust IT teams could manage on their own. Software providers often boast experienced, dedicated teams who will help in managing your solutions, freeing up your IT employees to focus on other tasks.
Just what exactly should you look for from the support provided by a cloud-based routing software vendor? Here's a list:
If your vendor is committed to putting out innovative software, they’ll push frequent updates to improve the functionality—all without your staff having to overcome any big hurdles. You’ll have access to the most updated versions of their cloud-based truck router along with quick access to the latest security patches. These are crucial to ensure that the solution is working at its best.
Your IT team will be freed from the responsibilities of performing and managing upgrades to the local software dispatched across the company's multiple locations.
If you’re working with other cloud-based solutions (e.g. for your ERP or point of sale functionality), this has the potential to make life much easier—and ultimately save you costs.
This is related to the point above, but it bears its own section: cloud native applications are generally going to offer easier integration with other enterprise supply chain management software. It’s hard to overstate how important this can be.
The typical fulfillment cycle might touch your company’s point of sale, ERP, WMS, TMS, route accounting, telematics solution, and more. If you don’t have an easy, automated way to make sure that the delivery data you’re seeing across all of your solutions is accurate and up-to-date, your ability to make smart, agile decisions about your supply chain is going to get bogged down quickly.
Luckily, cloud technology is fundamentally better suited to easy integration than on-prem technology deployments.
This means that you can easily create a more connected delivery management process that’s better-suited to powering smart, efficient deliveries. This might involve something as simple as feeding granular GPS data into your routing system to improve the accuracy of your ETAs to integration with route accounting or ERP systems to help simplify delivery costing.
Like we alluded to above, most businesses want to expand, and a cloud-based solution is a great partner during business expansion. If you want to either cover more geographic areas or take in higher delivery volumes, you may find yourself with more complex routing needs. Cloud-based optimized route planning software can help you quickly adjust to new business needs while offering consistent service levels and performance.
Your cloud-based solution provider will also ensure that your data is always available and is backed up regularly. This means your company will still have access to stored data even if your office or facility experiences a disaster.
Again, there are also fewer risks of software downtime with a cloud-based route planning solution due to its higher levels of resilience. Less downtime means a reduction of inconvenience, costs, and the possibility of disruptions to your operations.
You’ll also have more peace of mind knowing that your data is secure. The result of all the above is that you don’t have to spend as much money on active IT management.
You also don’t have to spend as much on physical infrastructure, on computing power that you’re not using, or on fixing the output of your legacy system for complex routing problems that it can’t handle.
These are just some of the reasons that a cloud-based truck router can present a truly cost-effective option. Cloud-based systems lessen the burden on your in-house IT team and help you scale up and adapt to new business needs.
No technology solution exists in a vacuum, and the more you’re able to err on the side of connected SaaS solutions for your last mile technology needs, the more effectively you can build a technology stack that will see your forward into a more efficient future.
When you start to think about future-proofing your logistics processes and the software that backs them up, cloud-based route optimization software begins to look less like a nice-to-have—and more like a necessity.