For retailers, wholesalers, and e-commerce businesses, the holiday season is the busiest time of year due to an extra demand for deliveries. Adding to the challenge, customers often require that their deliveries arrive by a certain date. This all means less flexibility for businesses and more time spent planning routes to avoid wasted resources. But there is a better option than trying to calculate routes on your own: route planning technology.
Just assigning staff to route planning is a poor use of resources. Technology can handle this task for you, leaving employees free to focus on tasks only they can manage. Plus, a route planner
will remember customers’ addresses and routes taken in the past to reuse again. This is better than searching through documents (or your memory), especially when you have a large amount of destinations to remember.
If you need to check later the date when an item was delivered and by whom, all the records will be saved in your route planner. This could help in case a customer makes a false claim about never receiving a delivery.
With route planning technology, you can add much more criteria to a single route than is possible with map software or human planning. You can include information such as service time, optimization goals, and up to 350 addresses in a single route. You can even include pickups and drop-offs of the same items in a single route, to improve efficiency. You will also have the option to manually adapt a route at any time if you want to change the stops.
Send out multiple delivery trucks at the same time — a route planner can best determine which truck should take each delivery to give drivers a balanced workload.
You can use the planned route with your navigation app. This is particularly useful when traffic deviates from normal patterns with people traveling out of town, paying visits to friends, and pushing to finish their holiday shopping.
Creating the fastest route will not only help you complete your deliveries sooner, it will also protect your vehicles from the undue strain of sitting in traffic for long periods of time and will reduce the costs of repeatedly filling your gas tanks.
The holiday season, with its overwhelming number of deliveries, is the perfect time to try a route planning service. Start your free trial of MyRouteOnline today.