There is a kind of delivery operation, which is as smooth as a practiced kitchen - each driver is aware of his station, each drop is dropped on time and the dispatcher completes his planning before the first cup of coffee is cold. The majority of operations are not that kitchen. The majority is more of a lunch rush with a single chef, a malfunctioning printer, and a specials board that is updated at a 20-minute time. The route optimisation software does not guarantee perfection. What it promises and always delivers is a planning process that ceases to be the most tiring aspect of the morning of everybody. Discover how advanced route optimisation software can transform your operations and make last mile delivery faster, more accurate, and cost-effective.
Most of the arguments that people start with are the fuel argument, which is not easily dismissed. Companies that have abandoned manual routing in favour of automated routing often claim fuel savings of 10-22 percent, not through driving behavioural change but through the eradication of the unnecessary kilometres that are quietly created by poor sequencing over time. After implementation, one of the transport coordinators found out that one of the drivers was including an average of 35 extra kilometres in his daily route over the past two years. No one intended it to be so. However, it was not noticed until the software mapped what the route really was as compared to what it was supposed to be. That loss, when multiplied by a fleet, is an incredible amount per year.
The depth to which these platforms process is truly difficult to grasp until you actually watch one in action. And all at the same time, balancing driver time, vehicle type constraints, customer time constraints, real-time traffic constraints, load weight constraints, and road access controls - all balanced into an optimised schedule by the time the kettle boils. In most aspects of operations, human planners are competent, experienced and cannot be substituted. They are not, however, at their best in pure variable processing under time pressure. The software does not panic when a booking is landed on 7:48am and three drivers are waiting to receive their run sheets.
Late deliveries do not only breed complaints. They cause a gradual erosion of client trust which hardly ever speaks itself out until a contract renewal discussion turns, to your astonishment, dead air. Good routing gives good ETAs, which in turn give good customer notifications, which in turn give good quiet reliability that keeps business without anyone having to fight to keep it. One procurement manager of wholesale distributor has explained it in straightforward terms after six months on an optimisation platform: "Our customers ceased questioning the deliveries. That is less than big. That is small. One of the less recognized commercial strengths that a logistics business can develop is operational consistency, which is provided over and over again in an undramatic way.