There is no delivery operation that does not have a variant of this problem. The day’s runs are made up by a feeling, by someone, a dispatcher, a manager, or at times a driver who has been around long enough to think he/she knows it better. Experience. Habit. And ninety percent of the time it is alright. However, efficient is not fine, and inefficient is scale is actually costly. Optimisation software of route is the solution to the gap between we got it and we did it well. You can get the best guide on https://saphyroo.com/solutions/route-optimisation.
The mechanics are of some little interest. The software works with your stop list, your fleet data, your time constraints and any constraints such as road types, driver certifications, load limits etc, and then generates sequenced runs that are constructed to achieve minimum waste. It does not get exhausted at 5am. It does not fail to the same suburb order because it is comfortable. It equally weights all variables and can arrive at solutions that routinely perform better than manual planning, sometimes by significantly large margins, something that first-time observers of the comparison data are surprised by. Switching has been described by one logistics manager as getting to know your best dispatcher had been holding money on the table three years not that he was lazy, just out of human constraint.
The self-evident win is fuel. Eliminate unnecessary kilometres and the savings are accumulated on P&L on a spot basis. However, it is in the reduction of overtime that some of the operations can get even larger profits. Unsequenced runs grow in an unorganized manner. Drivers finish late. Shifts extend. Take that up a fleet in one year and labour cost may be greater than the saving in fuel. Both contract with a narrowing of the route.
The customer experience is also enhanced simultaneously. ETAs can only be accurate when runs are not approximated but really planned. Live tracking will allow dispatchers to intercept a late delivery before it goes out of time, reroute around unforeseen issues, and provide customers with real-time updates rather than approximate ones. Such visibility of service was the prerogative of big logistics companies. Smaller operations are now able to reach the same capability – cost has been lowered significantly.
A single piece of truth telling advice before buying: do not test software on a quiet day. Stress-test it. Feast it your worst week – maximum volume, maximum callouts by drivers, schedule changes at the last minute – and see what it does. It is the platform which copes with the chaos and, nevertheless, generates the workable runs that is worth paying. All other things are merely a good demo.
