Businesses often underestimate the power of technology when it comes to order tracking and logistical management. In today’s fast-paced world, spending hours poring over maps and data with outdated methods is no longer viable. Failing to keep up with ever-changing customer demands can risk customer satisfaction, making manual planning profitless and unpromising! Instead of succumbing to the pressure of manual planning, leveraging smart technology can provide a new lease of life to modern day businesses.
Let’s explore why manual route planning is no longer suitable for modern day business and how adapting to new technologies can help your business grow and thrive!
Pitfalls of Manual Route Planning
Paper And Mind Mapping
For years, many businesses have been accustomed to relying on inadequate resources such as paper maps or a driver’s knowledge to plan delivery routes. Even today, drivers have to plan their routes based on their memory and live updates about traffic from the news, mileage or any possible unexpected obstacle. This mind-mapping method of planning routes is fallible and can never go without late or missed deliveries, making it a significant challenge for last-mile delivery operations.
Inadequacy of First Generation Planning Softwares
Using popular planning softwares like Google Maps for your deliveries is also a common method businesses use. While they are a helpful tool in everyday navigation, it may not be the most effective method of route planning for businesses. These methods are prone to unexpected delays and detours, and they cannot accommodate unexpected obstacles that may arise during delivery operations. This can be frustrating for business owners who need to maintain tight delivery schedules and ensure that their customers receive their orders on time.
Struggles of High-Volume Operations
While manual planning of delivery routes might suffice for small business owners with only a few
daily orders, it can become a tedious task when dealing with a large volume of jobs everyday. Planning efficient routes without the right tools is not only time-consuming, error-prone, and outside the mental bandwidth of humans, but it also sabotages the revenue and profit of the business.
So how does one effectively plan their delivery routes? That’s exactly what you’re going to find out here.
How Optimal Route Planning Drives Business Efficiency
As the saying goes, the journey is often more important than the destination, and this is especially true for service businesses. When drivers experience delays, missed deliveries, and miscommunication, customers are left with unsatisfactory experiences. To avoid such situations, it’s crucial to increase the efficiency of your business’s routing. But how can a route planner help you achieve this goal? Let’s explore the benefits together!
Informed Decision Making
Imagine having to call your drivers every hour to get updates, give instructions, or receive notifications about delay or road accidents. It’s not an ideal situation, is it? But with a route planner, you no longer have to rely on ambiguous foresight. Instead, you gain access to real-time data. This tool illuminates congested and inconvenient routes, allowing you to optimize delivery by choosing the most efficient paths.
Optimized Fuel Efficiency
Moreover, fuel prices can have a significant impact on the operational costs of any field service business, and with the recent surge in prices, it’s become even more critical for businesses to find ways to reduce their fuel consumption. Inefficient route planning is one of the primary culprits for excessive fuel consumption, leading to higher vehicle maintenance costs and ultimately impacting the bottom line. However, efficient route planning allows you to take the shortest route saving businesses both time and fuel.
Fostering Satisfaction And Loyalty
It is also critical for businesses to improve the customer experience, the cornerstone of any successful service business. Customers expect quick and efficient deliveries, and delays due to poor route planning can result in dissatisfied customers. In contrast, agile management practices prioritizing efficient route planning lead to better customer feedback, essential for long-term business growth.
Increase Efficiency And Productivity
The route planning tool serves as a valuable personal assistant, simplifying the process of route creation and editing for your team, while also responding to unforeseen events that may impact service delivery. By optimizing your routes, your drivers can deliver to multiple locations in the shortest amount of time. Rather than multiple drivers being assigned on the same route, a proper route planner can allocate tasks to drivers based on their proximity and service areas. This is the most efficient way to save time and money while maximizing orders and tasks. In essence, the route planning feature is the central hub of everyday operations for your service business.
Do Less, Achieve More
Moreover, a route planner improves your journey by maximizing outcomes with the lowest resources. In its data-driven manner, route planner not only shows you the whereabouts of the driver’s location but deciphers the entire route map for you. You can see the estimated time of arrival, the location of multiple stops at routes, whereabouts of the crew members, and keep you updated with any unexpected circumstances like congestions, road closures, or accidents. The route optimization feature allows you to re-edit and optimize your routes when an unexpected event occurs.
Advanced Route Planner to Top-Up Your Game
As technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, businesses are faced with the challenge of keeping up with emerging trends. Fortunately, services like Arrivy, are designed to offer practical solutions that can help streamline your tasks and boost operational efficiency. One of Arrivy’s key features is its Route Planner, which optimizes delivery routes for multiple stops, resulting in faster delivery times and significant savings on time and fuel costs. By utilizing this feature, businesses can stay progressive and successful while also being more cost-effective, efficient, and accurate.
Arrivy latest offering the Route Planning Pro has been designed to provide businesses with granular control over their routes. This feature enables users to plan their routes manually with ease using drag and drop functionality. The Route Planning Pro functionality allows businesses to plan hundreds of routes within minutes and create special deliveries in a single route, making it an ideal solution for companies with high-volume tasks. With this feature, businesses can efficiently manage their delivery or service schedules, ultimately saving time and improving productivity.
If you’re interested in learning more about Arrivy’s Route Planning Pro capability, please reach out to us at info@arrivy.com.
Leave a Reply