If you’re like most people, you’ve already broken a few of the New Year’s resolutions you made for 2017.
Was one of your resolutions to make your business more efficient? You can still meet that goal. When you have final mile optimization software, maximizing efficiency is easy (it’s certainly easier than going to the gym every day).
Here are five ways route optimization software will help you make 2017 a success for your business:
#1 Training Doesn’t Take So Long
Final mile optimization software will help you train your drivers on the job. GPS tracking allows you to see what your drivers are doing in real-time, so you’ll always know when a new member of your team is speeding, driving recklessly, or not using the route you gave them. You’ll be able to give them a call and tell them to cut it out immediately.
New software can be confusing, though. Our route planning software specialists will show your staff how to use our program in detail, so every driver will know what they’re doing before they hit the road.
RELATED: Painlessly Switch To Route4Me With These Onboarding Best Practices
#2 Geofencing Improves Employee Oversight And Customer Service
Final mile delivery software often comes with geofence technology. With this feature, you can draw a custom boundary over a real-world map. Every time a driver passes through that boundary, you’ll know exactly when they did. You can use this feature to make sure your drivers are getting to your customers on time.
Geofencing also improves customer service. You can draw a geofence around a customer and set it up so that when your driver crosses through the geofence, a text message is sent to the customer. They’ll appreciate the notice.
RELATED: Automate Your Delivery Logs: How Geofencing Is Eliminating Tedious Paperwork
#3 Organize Your Teams
When you have multiple drivers split into different teams, keeping everything organized can be overwhelming.
Using a route planner makes this much easier. You can structure your fleet into a straightforward hierarchy, with team leaders listed as sub-users under the account owner and drivers listed as sub-users under their team leaders.
Different users can be assigned different permissions. For example, you can have it so that team leaders can create and edit routes, while drivers can only view routes and add notes.
RELATED: Fleet Route Planning Software : Why You Should Promote Your Drivers and How the Software Can Help
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#4 Know Where Your Drivers Are At All Times
Using route mapping software with GPS tracking capabilities is like being right there in the car with your drivers, even though you’re back at the office. You’ll always know whether your drivers are slacking off or sticking to schedule.
You don’t need to view GPS data in real-time if you don’t want to. Running a business is busy work, so you probably don’t have time to just sit around and watch what your drivers do all day. This information is saved so that your fleet’s movements can be played back at any time. How convenient!
#5 Quickly Design Accurate And Optimized Routes
There are probably some places in your service area that you want to avoid. Maybe you have to deal with a rough neighborhood that has a high rate of carjackings, or a particularly busy intersection that always seems to slow your drivers down.
That’s part of what makes route planning so complicated. There’s more to it than just finding which roads your drivers could take to get to your customers – you also need to account for traffic, weather, construction, and other factors to make the best use of your time and gas.
There’s also the fact that some customers are only available at certain times of the day. Figuring out how to hit all your time windows without being late to anyone makes route planning even more confusing.
So, designing optimized routes by yourself will take a lot of time. If you have dozens of stops and multiple drivers, it can take hours. And after all that effort, there’s no guarantee that the routes you come up with are the most efficient routes possible.
But you don’t need to do route optimization by yourself. When you have a route planning program, accounting for all the factors involved with route planning is easy. Software does the hard work for you. The only thing you need to do is plug in the addresses of your customers, and then your route planning program will produce an optimized route for you in 30 seconds or less.
Route optimization software also gives you the ability to design routes that get your drivers to your customers while avoiding left turns. This will help you save gas, as left turns force your drivers to spend a lot of time idling as they wait for traffic to clear. That’s not really a problem with right turns.
UPS saves hundreds of millions of dollars every year by avoiding left turns. If UPS does it, it would be smart for you to do it as well.
RELATED: How Routing Optimization Software Can Help Your Drivers Avoid Left Turns
Route scheduling software offers dynamic routing, too. Whenever you make a change to a route at your office, the changes you made will be automatically shared with your driver on their mobile app. And when the ETA for a delivery is extended because of heavy traffic or some other delay, the ETA your customer is looking at will be updated automatically.
Delays are never good, but it’s always best to share such delays with your customers ASAP so that they can adjust their plans accordingly. A route planner makes this possible.
Do you have any questions about final mile optimization software? Let us know in the comments section below.
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