The owners of smaller fleets have been underserved by the providers of route optimization software for a long time. We are offering a very simple solution that requires little training and may be used by the existing route planning staff.
Andrew explains how to use consolidated jobs in Strategic Movements. Consolidated jobs are used to ensure that multiple stops are placed on the same vehicle and are serviced in an the order specified by the trip planner.
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.
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.
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.