Does the time spent optimizing routes really save you money?
In a perfect world, your drivers would know exactly who to visit and in what order. They would also not need any supervision, dispatching, training or guidance. But, in the real world, you’re responsible for your drivers and having them meet the daily obligations. Without a delivery app, that means hours of route planning by hand.
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Also, transportation and vehicle costs probably take up a huge chunk of your monthly budget. With that in mind, you can’t afford to have your employees wasting time and money driving around aimlessly. So, employees need a planned route handed to them on a silver platter. With a road trip planner you can create such driving routes in seconds for all your drivers and don’t need anyone planning routes manually or guessing.
But, in what other ways can a trip planner save you time? Read on to find out.
Store Your Client Locations in One Place
One of the biggest time wasters for any business is poor organizational skills or systems. A study by Fujitsu determined that professionals waste over 150 hours each year searching for misplaced documents and information.
So, if you have all your customer addresses on index cards, in a binder or on the backs of napkins, you’re wasting more time than you think! Which is wasteful especially since, when using a delivery app, you can instantly find any customer location and even see them on a map. In this way, you’ll save time finding addresses and planning routes with just a single click.
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The Painfully Small Details Break Routes
Does a driving route planner merely offer a way to sequence the locations your drivers have to visit each day?
Absolutely not! A delivery app also factors in many variables that affect how your routes are sequenced, including the following:
- Different customers having differing priorities for your business
- Customers requiring drivers to arrive during specific time windows
- Some vehicles having different volume capacities, road restrictions, and maximum load weights
- Your drivers having different operator skills and specific drivers sometimes having to visit certain customers
Imagine if you had to plan a route to visit 500 locations per day while taking all the above into consideration. That would take hours! A delivery app can create an optimal route factoring in all the above in just a few seconds.
You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure
All those control knobs and meters in a nuclear power station are there for a reason. With them, the operators can monitor and measure every part of the plant to make sure it’s running safely and efficiently.
Do you have the same level of visibility into your business? Are you always guesstimating or do you use real numbers?
Computers might not be able to think by themselves (yet), but they surpass the human brain by light years when it comes to calculating numbers quickly. And, fleet management software automatically computes everything you need to know about the routes your company is running, such as:
- Distance
- Time, including how much time your drivers spend at a customer’s location and the estimated arrival times
- Fuel usage and fuel costs
So, you’ll be prepared for anything.
Plan Routes Quickly
With hundreds of stops and dozens of drivers, planning every route manually will waste time! Instead, you need a system that allows you to:
- Select any address from a list or map
- Enter the number of drivers you have
- Plan multiple routes at once based on the above data
- Distribute the routes automatically to your drivers’ phones so they know the exact sequence
The best route planners automate at least 95% of the work, leaving just a small amount of work for you in setting up and monitoring the process. In this way, you can focus on high-value tasks like growing your business by not doing everything yourself.
So, how do you reduce the time spent on route optimization? Do you have any questions? Please feel free to leave your comments below.
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