Gone are the days when refreshment delivery options were limited to pizza, Chinese, and some types of beverages. Today, consumers demand more choices, more convenience, and, most importantly, faster delivery than ever before. This has put tremendous pressure on the food delivery ecosystem.
Not only has meeting the rising consumer demands become challenging, but expanding your operations has become much more difficult as well. And, it’s a no-brainer that you can’t grow until you fix the current loopholes; a conundrum which has made many businesses put their growth on halt. But not anymore. With the help of advanced delivery scheduling solution like beverage logistics software, you no longer need to wait for months or years to expand.
How does truck map software help? Let’s take a look.
#1 Assess Your Capability before Taking on New Clients
Getting new clients will certainly give your sales figures a boost, but, at the same time, it might turn out to be too much work for you to handle if you don’t have the required bandwidth. If this happens, you’ll not only lose the clients, but you’ll also end up losing your business reputation and potential referrals, and your finances will take a hit.
This is where route planner software would be of great help. A route planner will help you identify how much you’d make from an expansion, before you invest any money in the actual expansion. In this way, you won’t end up wasting money on something that’s not worth it.
But how does it do this?
Well…the dispatch software comes with an interactive map feature that helps you identify where you’re doing well and where you’re not. The beverage logistics software will also show you how much it would cost to expand into a given area, factoring in all the information you need to analyze, such as the additional wages of your workers and fuel expenses. And when you have such crucial data in hand, expansion becomes seamless.
#2 Automate Your Route Planning
You can’t grow if you invest hours in doing manual tasks, especially when those tasks can be automated. For example, when you plan routes with pen and paper, it could take hours. And yet you’re still not be able to guarantee accurate routes. This is where fleet routing software can help.
A route planner for delivery drivers will help you plan accurate and well-optimized routes in just 30 seconds. And when your drivers get well-optimized routes they’ll be happy, and will be able to make more stops per day when you acquire new clients. Moreover, with such route optimization software, you’ll have a streamlined route planning process which ensures on-time deliveries, so you won’t need to worry about customer satisfaction.
Schedule optimization software also offers multiple options to help you add addresses into the system, and you can set several constraints (such as turn restrictions, avoidance zones, and weight and volume capacity) so that you can design efficient routes. In this way, all the routes will be free from traffic, bad weather conditions, cumbersome left turns and more, which means that you’ll always make deliveries on time.
Also, delivery management software comes with a geocoding feature to ensure that every customer’s address is 100% accurate. The software will automatically notify you if an address is incorrect when you try adding it into the system. It’ll even provide auto-suggestions so that you don’t need to waste time in searching for right address.
Most importantly, the dispatch software will automatically plan routes in such a way that each driver gets an equal workload.
#3 Tighten Your Control over Field Operations
If you don’t have enough control over your field operations, expansion could turn deadly for your business and this is why you need fleet mapping software that offers vehicle location tracking capabilities.
Vehicle tracking helps you visualize what your drivers are doing on the roads. So you will immediately know if a driver is not following the routes properly, falling behind schedule, making unplanned stops, or needs some emergency roadside assistance. And if you don’t want to spend hours looking at the activities on a map, the GPS tracker even allows you to set alerts.
For example, if a vehicle is idle for a long period of time, or exceeding the speed limit, you’d immediately receive an alert. You can then communicate with the driver to rectify their behavior. This saves you time, reduces additional fuel expenses due to speeding and idling, helps you avoid legal hassles, and ensures driver safety. And when you can ensure driver safety and prove that your drivers drive safely on the road, you may even receive discounts from your insurance provider. Imagine the money you could save here, which you can then invest in growing your business further.
#4 Design and Manage Territories Efficiently
Delivery scheduling software helps you segment your field reps into different regions so that each rep or driver can make stops that are relatively close together. And when your clients are grouped closer together, your drivers can make more stops or visit more clients over a shorter period of time.
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For example, if a new client falls under the northern region of the area you cover, you can assign the new route to the driver who already only covers the northern region for your existing clients.
But how does the software help do that?
A dynamic routing tool comes with a territory management feature that enables you to draw a territory, name the territory, choose a color for its display on the map, save a region as a group, and plan routes based on region selection. You can even add an unlimited number of territories by repeating this process. You can also draw overlapping territories and hide or display a specific territory on the map.
#5 Use Reporting and Analytics
Before you expand, you first need to ensure that all the data about your field operations is at your fingertips so that you don’t regret your decision later. Beverage logistics software provides data on every critical detail of your field operations, including the following:
- The amount of stops your drivers make versus the planned amount
- The total distance
- The routes made per day
- The average time spent at each stop
- The time taken at each stop versus the allocated time at each stop
- The total gas expenses
- The average trip gas expenses
All this information help you assess whether it would be wise to expand with the current performance. The multiple destination route planner will also provide you with the ability to set fuel costs in a specific area to help you keep track of your gas expenses. And it comes with a timeline tool that helps you analyze the data for selected routes over a given period. So if you had so much crucial data in hand, do you think expansion would still be tough for you?
Other Features
We’ve discussed the five ways in which a beverage logistics software can ensure your expansion goes right, but the best route planners also offer several additional useful features. Here are a few of them.
Use Geofencing Technology to Automate Check-Ins and Check-Outs
Vehicle routing software come with geofencing which is a location-based technology that creates a virtual fence around an object, such as a person, vehicle or package. The object is then monitored with GPS technology in a defined, real-world geographical boundary.
This advanced technology automates the check-in and check-out process to save you time, boost your productivity, and help your drivers make more stops. Moreover, it makes it easy for you to keep track of your drivers. This is because vehicles and packages can be tracked inside pre-defined areas and you’ll immediately be notified when a driver enters or leaves those regions.
The best part is that geofences get automatically triggered inside the route optimizer app, and you don’t need to enable or disable it in order to make it work for you.
Use Software Based on the Cloud
The best routing programs are often cloud-based as this offers a plethora of benefits and simplifies field operations management.
For example, most cloud-based route planners operate on a pay-per-use model, which helps you avoid long-term contracts, unlike traditional or hosted trucking dispatch software.
Also, the infrastructure, maintenance, data security and so on is taken care of by the software provider. And cloud-based routing programs are scalable, so you never need to worry about outgrowing your system, you just need to upgrade or downgrade your plan as needed. Cloud-based route planners are not machine-independent, so you can literally access the beverage logistics software from anywhere and at any time. You just need a stable internet connection, and you can plan and monitor everything from any device.
Explore the Power of Virtual Reality
Virtual reality has been impacting several industries, and the good news is that there are now advanced routing programs available for field operations management that help you explore virtual reality as well. For example, Route4Me comes with a virtual reality app that helps you see several screens in a single 360° dashboard. You can then use the virtual reality dashboard to “fly” over your routes and confirm that everything’s set up exactly the way you want it.
Use a Telematics Gateway
A telematics gateway is another great feature that you can explore in sophisticated route planners. For example, Route4Me’s telematics gateway allows you to integrate data from third-party telematics systems. Currently, Route4Me integrates with Geotab, Azuga, TomTom, VTS Silent Passenger, Teletrac, and Teletrac Navman.
With Route4Me, vehicles from connected third-party systems are automatically imported and resynchronized into the account of the corresponding Route4Me user. Each Route4Me vehicle can then be “linked” to a vehicle that is external to Route4Me. And when tracking data is captured from a third-party system, the data is sent to Route4Me and evaluated to determine which vehicle (by ID) is associated with the connected vehicle ID. The last-known active route for the corresponding Route4Me vehicle ID is then identified and tracking data is appended into the route’s tracking history. New vehicles are also automatically reconciled every minute. To use this feature, you can link a vehicle to a route either during the route planning process or after the route has been planned.
So are you planning to expand your business soon or are you in the process of doing so already? Do you have any questions about beverage logistics software? Please feel free to leave your comments below.
Also, before moving forward, first ask yourself the following questions to ensure you understood the benefits and features of beverage logistics software:
- How does beverage logistics software save you hours in route scheduling?
- Why should you go for a cloud-based route planning software?
- What is a telematics gateway?
If you correctly understand how beverage logistics software can help you expand, you can harness the full potential of it.
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