Lately there have been quite a few articles written about labor shortages at the end of the pandemic. There is a shortage of qualified drivers which leads to driving positions not being filled and drivers working overtime to make all the needed deliveries.
If your route planning is not completely automated or takes more than 10 minutes to complete, you may be a good candidate for the Strategic Movements route planning and optimization application.
Strategic Movements can find low-cost routing solutions for more complicated distribution problems, like those facing shippers, or for freight brokers working for those shippers.
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.