Route4Me Releases New Feature to Make Pick-ups and Drop-offs Seamless

Route4Me Releases New Feature to Make Pick-ups and Drop-offs Seamless
Featured image credit: Manuel-F-O/iStockphoto.com

Route4Me puts your route planning on autopilot and makes the route optimization process a breeze which is why it is the world’s most-used dynamic route sequencing and optimization software platform. And, now it offers a new advanced pick-up and drop-off optimization feature that makes your pick-up and drop-off route planning process seamless. This new feature makes Route4Me even more powerful than any other.

But, how does this feature work? How can it benefit you? We discuss all this below.

Why Do You Need the Pick-up and Drop-off Optimization Feature?

Our new pick-up and drop-off optimization feature is ideal for specific field service businesses that need its drivers to visit customer addresses in pairs, where one address needs to be visited to pick up packages or people and the second address needs to be visited to drop off the picked up packages or people. 

An example of such a business is a non-emergency medical transport (NEMT) business, where drivers pick up a patient from one location, be it at home or office, and drive him or her to another location, such as a hospital. Doing this should be easy if you’ve only got one or a few patients to transport, but imagine if you need to pick up and drop off hundreds of patients across the city with each patient needing to be picked up from a different location and dropped off at a different place. Figuring out when and where to pick-up and drop-off each patient in the most cost-effective and efficient way will be a challenge. The same holds true when your drivers need to make hundreds and thousands of deliveries.

Route4Me’s new pick-up and drop-off optimization feature helps you plan and optimize routes with hundreds or thousands of pick-up and drop-off address pairs easily, using an advanced algorithm to ensure the pick-up address from each address pair is always visited first and the corresponding drop-off address is visited second in a correct sequence.

Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?

Whether you want to slash the time it takes you to plan routes for your drivers, increase the number of stops they can make, or keep your customers satisfied knowing that your drivers show up on time… Route4Me helps you achieve that!
Start Free 7 Day Trial
Route4Me

How to Use the Feature?

Below are the steps to access the feature and optimize your routes accordingly:

  1. Go to ‘Plan new Route’ from the navigation menu and select the ‘Upload a File’ option.

Pick-Up and Drop-Off Route Planning – Planning Routes with Pick-Up and Drop-Off Address Pairs Using the Route4Me Web Platform (Without Time Windows)

       2. Next, go to the ‘Optimization’ tab and select the ‘Multiple Drivers Route’ optimization type so that Route4Me can plan multiple routes from the imported addresses if needed.

Pick-Up and Drop-Off Route Planning – Planning Routes with Pick-Up and Drop-Off Address Pairs Using the Route4Me Web Platform (Without Time Windows)

      3. Specify the remaining parameters according to your preference and click the ‘Create Route and Proceed to Add Addresses’ button.

Pick-Up and Drop-Off Route Planning – Planning Routes with Pick-Up and Drop-Off Address Pairs Using the Route4Me Web Platform (Without Time Windows)

    4. Upload your spreadsheet with the pick-up and drop-off address pairs. Make sure that the spreadsheet has separate pick-up and drop-off columns as well as a header row which defines the type of data and data rows that contain the actual data.

Pick-Up and Drop-Off Route Planning – Planning Routes with Pick-Up and Drop-Off Address Pairs Using the Route4Me Web Platform (Without Time Windows)

The address pairs should also have the same unique custom-defined ID in both columns.

Pick-Up and Drop-Off Route Planning – Planning Routes with Pick-Up and Drop-Off Address Pairs Using the Route4Me Web Platform (Without Time Windows)

You can use custom aliases to track and manage your pick-up and drop-off addresses easily. For example, you can define the ‘Pick-up’ and ‘Drop-off’ aliases for each address pair in the spreadsheet and suffix both aliases of each address pair with its unique ID.

Pick-Up and Drop-Off Route Planning – Planning Routes with Pick-Up and Drop-Off Address Pairs Using the Route4Me Web Platform (Without Time Windows)

      5. Once you’ve uploaded the address pairs, Route4Me will process the imported data and display it in the corresponding window. Click ‘Continue to Review’.

Pick-Up and Drop-Off Route Planning – Planning Routes with Pick-Up and Drop-Off Address Pairs Using the Route4Me Web Platform (Without Time Windows)

   6. You’ll see a ‘Verify Address Map’ window which shows all the imported and processed addresses on the map, including their geocoding statuses. The depots are displayed on the map as depot icons and the main distribution center is displayed as a route stop. Once you’ve reviewed the map, click ‘Finish Import’.

Pick-Up and Drop-Off Route Planning – Planning Routes with Pick-Up and Drop-Off Address Pairs Using the Route4Me Web Platform (Without Time Windows)

Once the route is planned, in the route’s stops list, you will see that the imported addresses are sequenced in such a way that in each pick-up and drop-off address pair (marked with the predefined custom aliases), the pick-up address will always be visited first and its corresponding drop-off address will always be visited second.

Pick-Up and Drop-Off Route Planning – Planning Routes with Pick-Up and Drop-Off Address Pairs Using the Route4Me Web Platform (Without Time Windows)

However, if the route with pick-up and drop-off addresses is optimized as a regular route (without the pick-up and drop-off optimization), then this route might have drop-off addresses placed before their corresponding pick-up addresses in the route’s stops sequence.

Pick-Up and Drop-Off Route Planning – Planning Routes with Pick-Up and Drop-Off Address Pairs Using the Route4Me Web Platform (Without Time Windows)

If you want to learn more about Route4Me’s pick-up and drop-off optimization feature then read our article on pick-up and drop-off route planning. Do you have any questions? Please feel free to leave your comments below.

Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?

Whether you want to slash the time it takes you to plan routes for your drivers, increase the number of stops they can make, or keep your customers satisfied knowing that your drivers show up on time… Route4Me helps you achieve that!
Start Free 7 Day Trial
Route4Me

About author: Rahul Dasgupta

Rahul Dasgupta is a content writer with over 20 years of work experience. He holds a master’s degree in computer science and has written thousands of blog posts on route planning and scheduling, making it easy for readers to learn about these complex topics. Rahul enjoys playing tennis in his spare time and loves cuddling with his pet labrador Shinu. Rahul is a big fan of Roger Federer, Messi, and Bill Gates - he admires their drive to be the best at what they do and their philanthropic efforts.

Route4Me

About Route4Me

Route4Me has over 40,000 customers globally. Route4Me's Android and iPhone mobile apps have been downloaded over 2 million times since 2009. Extremely easy-to-use, Route4Me's apps create optimized routes, synchronize routes to mobile devices, enable communication with drivers and customers, offer turn-by-turn directions, delivery confirmation, and more. Behind the scenes, Route4Me's operational optimization platform combines high-performance algorithms with data science, machine learning, and big data to plan, optimize, and analyze routes of almost any size in real-time.