Route Management: How To Optimize Your Fleet’s Performance

Route Management

Efficient route management improves the effectiveness of fleets and maximizes the number of deliveries. At the same time, it can reduce the mileage and drive costs. This article will guide you through the route management trends, benefits, and challenges.

WHAT IS ROUTE MANAGEMENT?
First of all, we need to answer the question: what is route management?

Route management is the way to increase the efficiency of your delivery process, and it ensures optimization of fleet operation by tracking and analyzing the vehicle routes.

The software for route management allows minimizing travel mileage and general cost of delivery. It is an advanced tool for strategic planning of routes by analysis of big data. Fleet route management also ensures the safety of driving by tracking and analyzing drivers’ activity.

ROUTE MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES
In a post-pandemic world, efficient and fast delivering products and goods became essential characteristics for logistic companies. It does not matter if you run a small or big business, as the challenges you need to deal with are similar for all companies. Route management is a complicated process and can be challenging even for companies with significant experience in the market.

There are the most significant challenges in route management the companies are struggling with:

  • Lack of expertise. The COVID-19 became a massive challenge for logistics companies, as they needed to handle all the fast-growing number of deliveries. People still order more products online in the post-pandemic world, and it becomes impossible to manage all the deliveries without advanced software solutions.
  • Multiple variables for route planning. Planning the route manually, you need to consider much information for each trip. It can be the availability of drivers, loading of ways, delivery time windows, and capabilities of vehicles for different trips. Route management software ensures that all variables will be considered.
  • Ability to make urgent route changes. Another challenge for companies who use to plan the routes manually is managing acute changes in the road, vehicles, or drivers. It can be a change because of the weather, traffic because of an accident, or breaking a car. The software solution can predict all the changes and plan the pivots in a short time. Furthermore, it will also send a notification to every person who is involved in the delivery process.

THE MAIN BENEFITS OF ROUTE MANAGEMENT
There are many benefits for companies that implement route management software, such as an increase in service profitability and improvement of vehicle utilization. On average, the route management tools can decrease the travel time by 15%, and as a result, optimize the cost of delivery.

Next, we will point out the most significant benefits of fleet routing management IT-solution:

  1. Save time. Route optimization allows the company to save time on unnecessary and inefficient stops. Tech solutions can navigate complex multi-stops routes and make every delivery as efficient as possible.
  2. Save money. When the vehicle makes fewer unnecessary stops and uses optimized routes, the company saves money on fuel. On average, optimized routes can increase fuel-saving by 20%-40%.
  3. Increase customer satisfaction. Optimized routes ensure the fast and quality delivery of products for customers. Most customers want to track the delivery and get complete visibility of their packages on the way. Fleet management route optimization ensures the most accurate estimate delivery time and notification for customers.
  4. Increase the quality of the workforce. Drivers also are satisfied by route optimization tools, as they will not get stuck in traffic jams or make unnecessary stops. Advanced software will have the most accurate route planning that can be optimized in real-time based on the circumstances.

ROUTE MANAGEMENT FEATURES FOR EFFICIENT FLEET’S PERFORMANCE
Many features can help you to navigate the routes and optimize the fleet’s performance. Here are some of the most important you need to consider choosing the best software:

  • Real-time monitoring. You should be able to track vehicles and deliveries in real-time.
  • Mapping. This feature will help to visualize the whole delivery process.
  • Reports and alerts. Every change in the route should be on your dashboard.
  • Mobile app. You need to be able to manage the road from any device and at any time.
  • Data analysis. The tool should analyze all the data from the drivers, vehicles, and routes for better strategic planning.
  • Delivery tracking metrics. You can improve your delivery operations by using different metrics to track all the processes. For example, you can monitor KPIs and segment the data by the driver, day, week, hour, or destination.

THE BEST EXAMPLES OF ROUTE MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS: CASE STUDY
Cprime has broad expertise in building route management software. One of the great corporations in logistic management was our work with Cantaloupe Systems, and the software solution we created made the company one of the fastest-growing companies in the USA. Moreover, around 80,000 machines spread all over the world are managed by Cantaloupe Systems solutions.

In this case, we needed to create a data analytics tool that could aggregate the data from the vending machines and provide operators with instructions for which engines to visit and which products to replenish, which planogram should be implemented, and which appliances need to be repaired.

Cprime has built four leading vending machine route management solutions for Cantaloupe – Seed 2 (Aeon), Seed Root, Seed Management, and Seed Sync – and delivered 20 service projects, including DB backup manager, DB version manager, and Web Commander. We also include such features into software solutions as automatic prioritization of the machines to be serviced and service scheduling based on real-time demand, managing market sections, protection against theft, power outages through real-time email and SMS.

Also, you can learn more about this case and other features that helped create a route management software for matching the clients’ needs.

CONCLUSION
This article briefly described the challenges you can face choosing the best route management solution for your business and outlined the benefits of advanced tech tools for managing your fleet. It would help if you remembered that the logistic industry would be growing fast next year and you will need to get the best solution for managing your fleet and efficient performance. If you still have questions about building route management for your business, you can discuss them with our specialists.