If you’re serious about improving your business’s profit margin, you need a route optimizer app.
Why?
Well, field operations management comes with many responsibilities. You need to ensure your drivers show up on time everyday to make your customers happy, focus on driver safety, be law compliant, and, most importantly, continuously reduce costs.
But the frustrating part is that even after a significant amount of effort, you might still not hit the profit margin you need. This could be because there are aspects you might not be aware of, or aspects which you might not realize the importance of which could affect your profitability. This is where a last mile delivery app can help.
Below we discuss how a route planner can simplify your field operations management, and fill in the gaps that are costing your pocket and impacting your profits.
Make Your Route Planning Process More Efficient
Efficiency is directly linked with profits. The more efficient your business is, the more profits you’ll make. And the route to efficiency lies in eliminating old-school approaches, and adopting an advanced methodology to fix the loopholes that are affecting your profits.
For example, whether you offer last mile delivery services or on demand logistics, you need to ensure that all the planned routes are well-optimized so that your drivers never delay a single appointment.
But that’s hard to achieve if you plan routes using pen and paper. In such cases, your drivers will keep getting stuck in traffic, delaying appointments and annoying customers, and so you’ll lose money every moment. Obviously, this will not be good for your business. This is why you need a multi-stop route planner.
A multiple destination route planner will help you plan well-optimized routes, unlike manual route planning. You just need to add or upload your customer addresses in the software, and you’ll get 100% accurate routes within a minute. Also, all the routes will be free from traffic, bad weather conditions, avoidance zones, left turns or u-turns, and other factors that can impact negatively upon the effectiveness of your operation. So your field employees will never get stuck on the road, and will always show up on time.
Ensure All the Customer Addresses are Accurate
A single wrong address can make your entire routing process a mess. It’ll not only waste time and money for the one address, but also for your entire route. This is because turning up at one wrong address will affect all the other scheduled deliveries or appointments in the queue. This is why ensuring address accuracy is critical if you don’t want to increase your expenses and take a hit on your profits. Routing system software will be of great help here.
Such software come with a geocoding feature which flags any wrong addresses and suggests correct addresses as replacements. The best route planners even come with a dedicated plug-in to simplify ecommerce delivery. Such a plug-in helps you connect the route optimizer app with your ecommerce platform to automate the data transfer from the ecommerce platform to the vehicle routing software for route planning to save time and nullify any possibilities of data entry errors.
And, when you can plan routes in a blazing speed with the utmost accuracy, you never need to worry about making on-time deliveries and appointments again. Also, when your customers see that your team turns up on time, not just on one or two occasions, but every time, they’ll most likely keep hiring your services. This means steady revenue, which is crucial if you want to have consistent profits and increased job security, which leads to happy employees.
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Control Overtime Expenses
Overtime compensation is often an unplanned expense that keeps your profit margins down. Sometimes, overtime is necessary to satisfy an increased workload or dynamic customer requirement, but it is most often the result of poor control over field operations. This is where a route optimizer app can help.
Fleet routing software can help you control overtime expenses in several ways. For example, it can ensure an equal distribution of workload so that no driver or selected group of drivers has more work to complete than the others. Everyone gets an equal opportunity to work and earn, minimizing the possibility of overtime.
Also, such routing and scheduling software provides you with the ability to set ‘route duration’, while planning routes, to ensure your field employees don’t violate the total hours of service allowed per day. This will help you keep overtime in check.
Automate the Check-in and Check-out Process
Manually checking in and out and managing delivery logs is tedious and time-consuming. And add to that the possibility of lost paper slips that can put the entire process and effort back to zero. This is why you need a route optimizer app.
Fleet mapping software comes with geofencing technology that automates the check-in and check-out process. So, there will no longer be a need to maintain the sheer amount of delivery logs.
This will save drivers about 30 seconds per stop. This doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up. Imagine how many stops each driver makes in a week, a month or a year. Over time, you’ll save countless hours, and a whole lot of money, by automating the check-in and check-out process. The will also save you time in administrative work.
Shield Your Business from Unnecessary Expenses
Expense figures can make or break your profit margin. Regular and planned expenses are one thing, but unanticipated additional expenses can ensure that all of your efforts in achieving good level of profitability are in vain.
Moreover, if you manage your field operations without the help of advanced technology, such as a delivery scheduling solution, you may eventually find that some, or a significant portion, of your regular expenses might even have been unnecessary. So controlling your expenses should be your top priority, and this is made possible with last mile delivery apps.
A route optimizer app comes with a GPS tracking feature that can help here.
How does GPS tracking work?
GPS tracking helps you visualize your drivers’ activities on a map in real time so that you can immediately know if a field rep or driver makes an unauthorized stop or takes longer than planned at a specific destination.
For example, if any of your field reps waste time by making unplanned stops or taking longer lunch breaks, you’ll learn about it immediately, and can take the necessary action. Also, you can set alerts for speeding and idling. This will ensure that you know immediately when a driver speeds or idles his or her vehicles for a long time. You can then communicate with the driver to rectify the behavior. In this way, you can control additional fuel expenses that might have been wasted because of speeding, idling or making unnecessary and personal stops.
The vehicle route tracking feature not only lowers your fuel expenses, it also reduces your insurance premiums. By tracking driving routes, you can ensure driver safety, And insurance companies love this, as you’ll make less claims. This will result in lower insurance premiums. A few insurance companies even offer discounts if you use a GPS tracker as it’s a great tool to protect your vehicles from theft. Imagine the amount of money you’ll save…and all the money you save will eventually turn into improved profits.
Identify Those Clients Who Can Bring in Profits
Getting new clients will certainly give your sales figures a boost, but it won’t be profitable if you don’t have enough bandwidth to manage the new clients. Just think about it: employing 10 drivers to manage 50 clients, and having 10 drivers manage 100 clients is considerably different. Which one do you think would be more challenging?
So managing a large number of clients with a limited workforce will mess up your entire process, which could lead to you losing clients, damaging your business’s reputation, and putting potential clients off from contacting you. All this means that your finances will take a hit. And even if you hire more employees and vehicles, it may lead to additional expenses. At the end of the day, you’ll see you’re no longer able to turn around your profit figures. This is why you need to focus on strategic sales planning and expansion, and trucking dispatch software can make this job easier.
A route optimizer app allows you to create mock routes to identify how much you’d make from an expansion, and how much it would cost you, by factoring in all the information you need to analyze. This can include critical expenses, such as additional wages of your workers and fuel costs, before you invest any money in the actual expansion. This is a great way to ensure that you don’t waste money on something that’s not worth it. After all, if a client brings in peanuts in terms of profits, acquiring such accounts won’t be good for your business, and ultimately doesn’t make sense. And when you have such crucial data at your fingertips, expansion becomes seamless and pocket-friendly.
So what strategy do you follow to improve your profits? Have you ever explored route optimization software? Do you have any questions? Please feel free to leave your comments below.
Also, here are three quick questions you should ask yourself to ensure you understand the benefits of a route optimizer app:
- How can route planner software help you control your fuel expenses?
- How can a route optimizer app help you keep a check on overtime expenses?
- How can last mile tracking benefit your business?
Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?
