We all know that a penny saved is a penny earned and vehicle routing software makes this old idiom possible. It reduces the time wasted on route planning and management, speeds up the on-field communication process, and eliminates the margin of any error that can impact your field operations, and cost your pocket a pretty penny.
But how can routing and scheduling software do all of this? Can a route planner save you a significant amount of money? How reliable is a routing program? Let’s dig in to learn more about the software to answer these and many other questions you may have. Read on.
#1 Plan Routes in Less than a Minute
Pen and paper route planning eats up your productive hours. Add to that the time wasted on sharing, distributing, and communicating the routes to the drivers or field reps. Yet, when all these activities are finished, you’ll literally only have a few hours left of the workday. This process goes on forever, month after month, year after year, wasting hundreds, if not thousands, of hours, causing you to lose money. After all, time is money, right?
And, even after spending so many hours, you still can’t guarantee you have accurate routes. Your drivers may still show up late, your customers may keep getting irate, and you may lose new opportunities and even existing customers and employees. Do you think that’ll be good for business?
Remember what Tony Robbins said? “If you change nothing, nothing will change.” So, if you continue planning routes manually, you’ll keep losing money and your business will suffer. This is why you need vehicle routing software.
A multiple destination route planner can help you plan routes in just 30 seconds. Imagine how much time you’ll save! You just need to upload the customer addresses into the software and the routing system software will provide you with 100% accurate and well-optimized routes which are free from traffic, bad weather conditions, avoidance zones, and any other constraints that can impact your routes.
And when your field service reps get accurate routes, they’ll always show up on time and make more stops per day, which means more money for themselves as well as for your business. Won’t that be great for your business?
Also, you don’t need to be Elon Musk to use a multi-stop route planner. The best routing programs come with an easy-to-use interface, minimizing the learning curve and helping you get started in no time.
The cherry on top will be if you use web-based delivery management software, as such software doesn’t come with any strings attached. You don’t need to install anything on your computer and you can use it anywhere and at any time. You won’t even need to sign up for lengthy contracts.
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#2 Know Where Your Field Reps Are
What if your field reps or drivers take longer lunch breaks? What if they are making personal or unplanned stops? Also, what if a driver drives over the speed limit? This will not only increase the likelihood of road mishaps, but it can also increase your business’s fuel expenses. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, aggressive driving can reduce your gas mileage by 33% on highways and by 5% around town.
This is why simple route optimization is not sufficient to make your field operations efficient. You also need to ensure that your field reps or drivers follow the routes assigned to them and drive responsibly.
A commercial GPS tracker will help you monitor, in real-time, what your drivers are up to on the roads via a map included in the software. In this way, you can easily figure out if a driver is ignoring your instructions. You can even set alerts to immediately learn about a driver speeding, so that you can communicate with him or her, in real-time, to rectify the behavior and control the excessive fuel usage.
Similarly, you can save fuel expenses by nullifying excessive idling. In the same way as the speed alert works, the GPS management software will notify you in real-time whenever a driver idles his or her vehicle for a long period. According to reports, excessive idling can cost you almost a gallon of fuel per hour and this amount can go up based on air conditioner usage and, most importantly, engine size. Just imagine how much money you’ll save with a GPS tracker for cars.
However, it is recommended to go for route planner software that comes with vehicle tracking capabilities, instead of opting for two different items of software. This will reduce the hassle involved with managing multiple software solutions, and will help you get the best of both worlds offered by dynamic routing and vehicle route tracking all under one roof.
#3 Lower Your Insurance Premiums
Insurance companies love organizations that are serious about driver safety.
Why?
Well…when you keep your drivers safe, you’ll make fewer claims and they’ll make more money. This means lower insurance premiums for you. Some insurance companies offer savings of up to 40% if fleet safety scores reach a certain threshold. So ensuring driver safety should be your top priority in order to save money.
Controlling reckless driving is one way to ensure driver safety. Also, when you use vehicle routing software with last mile tracking capabilities, you’ll also be able to ensure that your drivers never need to call you or text you while they’re driving to ask for directions if they get lost, which is often the cause of road mishaps.
Tracking devices are even considered anti-theft aids and insurance companies will offer discounts if you use such technologies. For example, USAA offers up to 33% discount and AAA insurance offers about 20% discount for the use of such devices.
#4 Verify Addresses Efficiently
Your job doesn’t just end with sharing customer addresses with your drivers. You also need to ensure that every address you provide them with is 100% accurate. If there is an inaccurate address, your field reps will not be able to show up on time at that customer’s address, as well as at all the subsequent customer addresses in the list. This is because being late at one stop will often make your drivers late for their following stops as well.
Such a wrong entry can be the fault of a customer who makes an accident while filling in the order information. But you can’t blame your customers. Also, such errors can occur at your end. Manually inputting customer data is a tedious process. It’s easy to accidentally type in “2332” instead of “2323” after an hour of mind-numbing number-crunching.
A map route planner 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 the correct address.
Also, the best route planners nullify incorrect data entry possibilities by automating the data transfer process. For example, Route4Me comes with an eCommerce plugin that connects our last mile delivery app with major eCommerce platforms, including WooCommerce and Shopify. In this way, it automates the data transfer process from the eCommerce platform to the software, while ensuring all the addresses transferred are accurate. So there’s zero risk of committing any data entry errors.
#5 Use an Automated Check-in and Check-out Process
Vehicle routing software is not only beneficial for your business, but also for your drivers. Such software comes with geofencing technology that ensures your drivers and field reps don’t need to check-in and out manually. This is because geofencing helps you create virtual perimeters for real-world geographical areas, in order to automatically monitor and record when your field reps arrive at and depart from each destination on their routes. So geofences are triggered automatically based on your preferred geofence settings.
In this way, geofencing saves a significant amount of time, improves productivity, and helps your field reps make more stops. You may find that the amount of time saved at each stop is negligible, but if you have 100 field reps who each visit 100 locations every day, you’ll end up saving almost 55 hours daily with the auto check-in feature. That’s like adding seven more drivers to your fleet at no additional cost. This ultimately means more money for both your drivers and your business.
#6 Run Data-driven Field Operations
Vehicle routing software also comes with a reporting and analytics feature that provides you with crucial data to help you identify bottlenecks that can impact your drivers’ productivity. This will help you exclude those areas when planning routes so that your field service reps can visit more customers, using less gas and less time. This means more savings for you.
Moreover, data collected with telematics can provide valuable insights into how you are using your resources, and also into driver performance. You can then provide your field reps with data-driven constructive feedback to improve their productivity. And greater productivity means more stops per day, and more money in your pocket, without any unnecessary expenses.
So what strategy do you follow to control unnecessary expenses and make more money? Have you explored any vehicle routing software before? Do you have any questions or points to add here? Please feel free to leave your comments below.
Also, here are three quick questions that you should ask yourself to ensure you understood the benefits offered by vehicle routing software:
- How does dispatch software help you learn if your drivers are following the routes assigned to them?
- How can a route planner lower your insurance premiums?
- How does vehicle routing software automate the check-in and check-out process?
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