Route Planning & Optimisation

Route optimisation is about calculating the best possible route for drivers to conduct their activities during each day. This may be to co-ordinate their deliveries or jobs using the shortest and fastest travelling route over the entire day.

Route planning and optimiation helps organisations find the most cost-effective routes and schedule tasks accordingly to help increase efficiency, productivity and profitability.

If your company ships or conducts field service to hundreds of customers each day, using a fleet of 20 or more vehicles, producing an optimal daily plan is pretty much impossible without the help of route planning and optimisation software.

A great route planing and optimisation solution considers multiple factors, such as an employees' work schedule, the order of jobs, the types of vehicles and whether they are suitable for delivery/entry to client premises or suitable for the task, traffic flows, employee certifications and inductions in to client sites and other limitations such as road sizes and bridge clearances.

An advanced route planning and optimisation system can help optimise routes and tasks as well as load balance works across the whole fleet to make organisations more efficient, whilst also keeping drivers on schedule, and reducing unnecessary costs and administration.

A Good Route Planning & Optimisation System Should :

• Provide the ability to route optimise multiple destinations for the entire day
• Provide route optimisation based on round trips, A to Z or Z to A where Z is the furthest point
• Allow swapping and changing or order by planners and automatically re-organise
• Allow for day of week and time of day historical traffic data flows
• Visually display routes and delivery points/tasks on a map with distances, travel times and job times for overview prior to dispatching
• Calculate estimated travel times and distance

A Great Route Planning & Optimisation System Should Also :

• Allow planners to set time windows on certain destinations to ensure they are met and other destinations are re-optimised
• Allow for vehicle properties such as size and ability for client sites and roads to accept those vehicles
• Allow do delivery/job task time frames in caclulating delivery/task time windows will be met for subsequent deliveries or tasks
• Allow for driver/field technician accessibility/inductions into delivery/work sites
• Allow for driver/field technician skill sets for suitability to delivery or site work/tasks
• Allow for driver/employee rest breaks and fatigue management
• Send delivery/work orders and navigational routes to an "in vehicle" navigational display
• Monitor daily route and work order/delivery progress and alert dispatchers if works/deliveries are unlikely to be met
• Allow for live re-allocation and re-optimisation of daily activies

The first thing you should consider is the reputation of the company & the suitability of the solution to your business.
With so many companies out there supplying Route Planning & Optimisation Systems, or very basic navigation systems without any telemetry data, it is important you do your due diligence to ensure the software you are evaluating, provides all the necessary functionality coupled to a great GPS tracking telemetry system further interfaced to an in vehicle navigational & work dispatch display.
If the quantity of orders and the customers you deliver or work for remain constant, you probably don’t need a Route Planning Solution that builds routes from scratch each day. However, if the volume of orders/delivery points change from day to day, a solution that creates optimal routes on a dynamic basis will be highly desirable.
If your organisations routing requirements are complex and you need to start planning before all orders are captured, it’s worth choosing route-planning software that can re-optimize each time fresh orders are added to the schedule.
Your drivers/field staff are more likely to follow your planned routes they are sent to an "in vehicle" GPS Navigation System. A route planning application that integrates with enterprise mobility solution such as Bizzow to collect vehicle-tracking data will be helpful for comparing actual performance of individual routes against the planned versions.
Route planning software that integrates with vehicle tracking shouldn’t go to waste. A good KPI dashboard can show you the difference between planned and actual kilometers for each route.
Route planning software is improving in effectiveness and cost. As well as optimising routes for improved fleet running costs, it offers the further advantage of doing in minutes what a human route planner couldn’t do manually in a day. Automation can therefore save you money in the transport office as well as out on the road.

With so many products and software combinations, it is difficult to provide indicative costs, however there are a few factors to consider when purchasing a Solution for your business.
Most providers will use the following pricing models:

• Buy Software Licence, pay for annual maintenance.
• Buy Software as a Service and pay a monthly fee based on the number of vehicles or jobs or routes optimised

Reputable GPS Fleet Management providers like IntelliTrac, are required to pay companies like Google Maps for commercial licences, and for more complex solutions we are also required to pay other mapping companies for the provision of speed limit data and other map data which is taken for granted these days.
In addition your annual or monthly subscription will also include:

• A cost for running a cloud service to host the software whether it be with a reputable cloud provider such as Microsoft, Amazon or Google, of whether it be in proprietary data centres with dedicated or shared servers.
• A cost for providing support and help desk staff to answer your calls, provide training and rectify any issues if and when they occur.
• A cost for on going product development, as browsers, operating systems, mapping interfaces and other features are constantly changing and require updating to keep your service active and working at its best.