The Customer
The Opportunity Council
The Opportunity Council offers last mile home delivery services to fulfill people’s needs for education, nutrition, support, direct assistance, and other critical aspects.
Challenges
During the pandemic, the Council’s distribution territory expanded overnight as they enrolled in a county-wide food bank home delivery program.
The lack of prior route optimization knowledge was the issue that the Council struggled with the most. On top of that, managing and organizing personal cars with different carrying and loading capacities was a challenge on its own.
Solution
The process of setting routes (which change each week with people coming on and off the list) was new for us. We found that Route4Me offered a great solution to this need.
To be able to organize their volunteer-powered fleet and send each car on the shortest and fastest route, the Council decided to implement Route4Me’s Route Optimization Software Solutions.
Implementation
The software was really intuitive to use. We didn’t need much support.
Route4Me is extremely easy to use and implement within any environment. Its intuitive, user-friendly interface and close-to-zero learning curve help keep training costs low and allow new users to start right away.
Benefits
We liked that Route4Me would find efficient routes for our volunteers, so they wouldn’t waste precious time.
Volunteers saved time and money by navigating the shortest routes while also increasing their productivity – thus, delivering more with the same or even fewer resources.
We are able to limit the pieces, which is critical for volunteers who can only fit a limited number of boxes in their cars.
Route4Me’s advanced route and asset optimization constraints allowed the Opportunity Council to plan routes factoring in such parameters as the number of available vehicles and the number of items each car could carry.
We have been able to deliver almost a half a million pounds of food since the beginning of our project to some of the most vulnerable members of our community.
Route4Me helped the Opportunity Council tackle the challenge of servicing a county-wide territory with a fleet of personal cars and a team of non-professional drivers
