Load planning is one of the most effective ways for transportation and logistics companies to reduce their expenses.
Load optimization can reduce overhead and fuel costs, improve delivery capacity, and increase profit margin.
There are many factors you need to consider in order to load your vehicles effectively. And this can take a long time to figure out by yourself. If you make a mistake, you might end up delaying your field employees or damaging the items you’re delivering.
But there’s no reason to do this by yourself. With advanced route optimization software like Route4Me, you can plan loads efficiently.
Table of Contents
What Is Load Planning?
Load planning is the process of combining shipments so that you can use fewer vehicles to deliver goods. This makes trips more efficient and reduces transportation costs.
Why Is Conventional Load Planning Process Inefficient?
There’s more to load planning than just consolidation. Simply stuffing a vehicle with as many packages as possible is generally not the right move. The manual load planning process is tedious and time-consuming as you must consider various factors.
For example, the shipment’s weight may be more than your vehicle can handle, even if all the items in the payload can fit. Similarly, you must consider that bridges and tunnels en route could be the barriers to transporting too high items.
Also, you need to pack the goods in reverse order so that the items to be delivered last are the first ones filled in the vehicle. Otherwise, your field employees will be forced to waste time digging through their items to find what they need before they complete each stop.
Another factor is fragility. You shouldn’t pack your fragile items under heavy items. You’ll ruin your reputation if you deliver damaged goods to your customers.
Also, you need to pack the shipments so that the weight is distributed evenly on both sides. Putting too much weight on one side increases the risk of your field employee getting into an accident.
Manual approaches to loading and route planning cause significant operational overhead.
Plus, your job could be challenging if the number of items in your vehicle or container increases. You need to carefully plan out distribution, and the loading sequence, especially if you have odd-shaped items on board. That’s why you need an advanced route optimizer like Route4Me.
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!
How Can Route4Me Route Planner Help with Load Optimization?
Route4Me doesn’t only create an optimized multiple-stop route. It also automatically generates a staging and loading plan for your route. It three-dimensionally evaluates and optimizes the loading process into your container. This ensures efficient packing of goods after your routes are optimized.
Capacity Optimization
Route4Me’s multi-stop route planner comes with an advanced algorithm that helps with pickup and delivery capacity optimization.
You just need to import pickup and delivery addresses with order capacity requirements and add capacity constraints into the system. The software will then plan well-optimized routes with accurate last-mile driving directions to complete all pickups and deliveries on time.
Route4Me’s truckload capacity optimization feature can help both Full truckload (FTL) and Less-than-truckload carriers.
For example, Route4Me’s delivery route planner helps FTL shippers maximize the vehicle utilization to help them use as few vehicles and drivers as possible. Similarly, the software enables LTL shippers to specify custom load capacity constraints.
Learn how to plan pickup and delivery routes with the load capacity optimization feature.
Mixed Fleet Capacity Optimization
In addition, Route4Me offers a Mixed Fleet Optimization feature to help optimize routes for a mixed variety of vehicles. They include vans, trucks, or other commercial vehicles. All vehicles have different heights, lengths, weights, and carrying capacities. And manually taking so many parameters into account can be daunting.
But, Route4Me’s Mixed Fleet add-on accounts for the varying capacity constraints of your vehicles. And it helps you utilize the capacity of each vehicle efficiently so that you don’t need to purchase extra vehicles.
Long story short, Route4Me’s delivery scheduling software takes the stress out of load planning. It accounts for all the factors related to load planning and determines the most effective way to load your vehicles for you, so you’ll have more time to dedicate to other areas of your business.
Conclusion about Load Planning and Optimization
The best route planners do not just help you with load planning. They also come with powerful features that make delivery management seamless and efficient.
For example, Route4Me’s vehicle routing software comes with GPS tracking that helps you track vehicles on the road in real-time. That way, you can always ensure they’re doing what you want them to do, and your field employees will be more productive when they know they’re being watched.
Also, Route4Me offers a customer portal feature that lets your customers track their delivery status in real-time.
Learn the six reasons you need delivery management software.
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!
