Reduce Your Transportation Costs With Route Optimization

Why Route Optimization?

Many places. Many ways to get there.

The problem is that many, if not most, routing tasks are complicated.

Most experienced human route planners can take a small number of delivery tickets without time windows or vehicle constraints and do a very good job of assigning work.

The human’s ability to make these efficient assignments degrades when there are more stops, or when the vehicles have capacity constraints, or when customers need to be visited at specific times.

Consider …

In many manual assignment processes, the work is first divided by town name or ZIP code. Stops that are very close together but end up in different groups may end up assigned to different vehicles.

Time windows are a customer service necessity, but when two deliveries on the same street need to be delivered at different times, the costs of using the same or different vehicles needs to be considered.

How stops are grouped and assigned to a route is the most important factor is reducing costs.

How does it work?

The three requirements for effective Route Optimization.

Route Optimization is more than just an artificial intelligence algorithm.

Stops In and Routes Out

No application stands alone.

Route optimization is also part of a robust business process. Stop data is collected in an external application, assigned to cost efficient routes, and is then tracked and analyzed.

Where does it come from?

Any application that can export shipment data in a popular file format can provide the stop data for Strategic Movements.

Other applications, like QuickBooks, have an interface available to simplify the data transfer process.

For specialized interfaces, an Application Programming Interface (API) is available.

Where does it go?

After routes are created, they can be exported to handheld terminal and/or GPS applications using the transfer interfaces provided by the application vendor.

If we don’t already have an interface to your existing vendor, we are able to create one for you.

And, as actual data becomes available, it is brought back into Strategic Movements.

Using the Cloud

Times have changed.

In the old days, an application for route optimization required a significant capital outlay. Regardless of how often routes were planned, sufficient computer hardware had to be available to provide a low cost routing solution.

In addition, software was licensed with a significant upfront price and recurring maintenance fees.

With cloud computing, there are no capital costs other than the workstation used by the route planner.

Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS)

  • No on-premises data center.
  • No servers.
  • No storage.
  • No backup schedule.
  • No networking hardware.
  • No security worries.
  • All computing resources accessed remotely.

Software As A Service (SaaS)

  • No upfront license costs.
  • No annual maintenance fees.
  • No downtime for upgrades.
  • Can be accessed anywhere
  • Easily scalable. Grows as you grow.

How much can you save?

Costs to Consider

  • Mileage costs – What does it cost per mile for fuel, depreciation and maintenance?
  • Overtime costs – What do you pay your drivers every day? What would you save if your drive time was reduced by 15%?
  • Planning costs – What would you save if your route planning time was reduced to just a few minutes each day?

.

(1) Total Daily Miles Driven
(2) Cost Per Milex
(3) Total Daily Mileage Cost=
(4) Estimated 15% Savings
(5) New Daily Mileage Cost=
(6) Overtime Cost Reduction
(7) Planning Cost Reduction
(8) New Estimated Daily Cost=
(9) Savings = (4)+(6)+(7)…………………….
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