Anyone that works in an organization with service technicians or delivery workers that drive to customer locations knows that there is always some planning that needs to be done each day to get the work done. In the simplest case, a load planner prints out work tickets from a business application and gives them to the worker who will be doing the driving.
Strategic Movements is a cloud-based service for route planning for both service technicians and product delivery. It provides provable benefits to its users by reducing the labor expense of planning routes, by producing more efficient routes, and by offering the capability to measure driver compliance in the execution of planned routes.
In addition to support for dynamic routes where work to vehicle assignments are made using an artificial intelligence process, and support for static routes where the assignments are made each day based on a master schedule, Strategic Movements also supports two types of manual route planning. Manual route planning with Strategic Movements is useful for organizations that make deliveries of products or provide specialized services that cannot be automatically assigned using dynamic routes and do not recur on regularly scheduled basis.
Most businesses want to reduce overall transportation expenses as much as possible while maintaining their equipment well and providing the level of service that their customers expect. For many businesses, a large part of the savings can be found using a software solution that makes intelligent decisions on assigning work to vehicles in the most cost-effective way. When the overall driving distance is reduced, so are fuel and other mileage-based maintenance costs. When the right assignments are made and the work is properly balanced, overtime costs are also reduced.
Ron takes a look at the daily route planning in this eleven minute podcast.
After route planning has been completed, tracking the execution of those planned routes is a very important part of the daily workflow for many organizations. Strategic Movements provides two parts of the tracking process. First, it can upload the planned routes to a GPS provider using their application interface. Then, as that provider captures tracking data, Strategic Movements can request that data on a regular basis and update the worker or vehicle position and status on the Dispatch Board.
Many organizations plan their last mile deliveries using routes that do not change very much over time. The customer being visited this Monday is visited by the same person that was there last Monday and will be visited by the same person again next Monday. The case for static routes is that some organizations have a relatively fixed customer base with few changes and that customer base is best served when the same person visits every time an order is delivered.
Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Customer (B2C) models require that someone decides how each service order or delivery ticket is assigned to the proper worker or vehicle for last mile delivery. There are three primary methods used for making those decisions: manual routes, static routes, and dynamic routes.
Donna explains the two ways to split a job that is too large to fit on a single trip in this two minute quick tip video.
GP Transfer is a report file (RDL) for Microsoft Dynamics GP that can be used to extract shipping data from a sales transaction and send it to Strategic Movements for route assignment.