Planning Recurring Work Efficiently
Many businesses visit the same set of customers on a regular basis. Examples of this are cleaning, document shredding and pest control service providers, and businesses that deliver water, snacks and beverages.
Many businesses visit the same set of customers on a regular basis. Examples of this are cleaning, document shredding and pest control service providers, and businesses that deliver water, snacks and beverages.
Although many of the people visiting the Strategic Movements website are looking for a route optimization solution, others are looking for a way to manage their recurring work. Strategic Movements is well suited for this type of organization which could be a paper shredding service, a medical specimen pickup service, a meals delivery service, or any other service where customers are visited on a regularly scheduled basis.
Significant savings can be achieved through route optimization. A key first step is to know your costs. Only when you know those cost, can you start to control them.
Time is money and time only marches on. Once a minute has passed, that minute is no longer available for any productive use. In the world of route planning, there are way too many opportunities to have unproductive minutes. Doing manual repetitive tasks or planning less than the best routes can yield quite a bit of time that could be spent elsewhere.
What happens when the yesterday’s deliveries did not go as planned? How does this impact the deliveries that need to be made today? How do you deal with these unplanned extra stops?
Many larger organizations have adopted some type of route optimization software in the past. Many have had successful implementations and are happy with their vendor today. On the other hand, there have also been many cases where the results were not what was expected. And, in many of these cases, a considerable amount of time and money was spent before abandoning the implementation.
When discussing optimization when planning routes, trips, or loads, the first thing that comes to mind is that the optimized end result reduces transportation costs by a significant amount. But there are other savings to be gained as well. The time needed to plan those routes, trips, or loads can take quite a long time every day.
Good communications is more than just a two way street where a dispatcher can carry on a conversation with a driver in the field. It also is a way to send data back and forth which can be turned into useful operational information.
One of the key reasons for using a route optimization application is the ability to use a GPS application for tracking, and then to compare the actual route driven with the route that was planned. Route optimization can save anywhere from 10 to 30 percent in overall transportation expenses every day, but these savings only can be achieved when the driver follows the route given.
Businesses are always in the process of reducing costs. Last mile product delivery is one place where costs can be reduced. Any business that does not use some type of route optimization or dynamic routing is leaving money on the table.