Although intangible resources are typically scarce and frequently ignored, they have a significant negative financial impact on your fleet. For fleet managers, it’s important to protect things like tyre health, engine hours, and transit time. They assist in doing this by fleet management software solutions like route planning.
It may not seem like much to plan routes and save 3 litres of fuel from one vehicle during one journey. Nevertheless, the numbers start to make a lot of sense when we take into account a fleet of more than 50 vehicles that travels extensively every day.
Fleet management software is a godsend for logistics management because it offers route planning solutions. Describe how in this blog, please!
Route Planning: What is it?
Route planning involves creating a route for your car that covers the necessary midpoints and takes you from point A to point B. It entails utilising geographic data to provide suggestions on the routes your driver should take to complete their assignment (s).
It is incorrect to frequently use the phrases “route planning” and “route optimization” interchangeably. Route planning is a stand-alone capability, but their combination makes the best use of trip management systems.
Planning a route helps businesses get the most out of each journey while staying on schedule. It is pre-planning supply chain operations with resource utilization in mind.
Why is Logistics Route Planning Important?
Logistical fleets generally have at least 100 vehicles. They must therefore make sure that even the tiniest KPIs that allow for rigorous monitoring take into account. They benefit from route planning by resolving the following problems.
- Information: Route planning provides information on how particular routes affect operations. For effective planning, operation time and cost requirement knowledge is essential. With the aforementioned knowledge, managers may plan operations in the most time- and cost-effective way possible, increasing earnings.
- Enhanced Budgeting: Setting fuel, operations, and other fleet budgets are closely related to route management. Budgeting will be more effective the better and more refined the insights.
The Reason Why Conventional Tour Management Fails
Prior to fleet management software, traditional route planning was the norm. Prior to technology, they provided fleet operators with excellent service, but today they utterly fail. Who knows why? Here are a few important justifications!
Manual Reliance
Manual labour is a requirement for traditional fleet management. Managers or route planners must manually assess each route to determine its length, traffic density, and safety.
This laborious method takes an exorbitant time, which could be spent strategizing. Additionally, handwritten route computations are prone to mistakes and inaccuracies and cannot be entirely accurate.
Real-time Visibility is Absent
Real-time visibility is an amazing tool for fleet function optimization. After all, without needing to connect calls to drivers, management can get an overview of where each of their vehicles is. Real-time visibility also provides managers with a sense of any irregularities along the route by providing them with a realistic trip performance on potential paths.
Route planners are unable to comprehend the density of route traffic during particular hours or days due to a lack of real-time visibility. Furthermore, it becomes difficult to determine precise ETAs to update consumers or higher levels of management without live vehicle tracking status.
Resource Utilization Is Poor
Better resource use is the main goal of route planning.
Yes, planning your route can help you save time and money. However, it also reduces tyre wear and tear, driver fatigue, and engine hours. Resources will inevitably squander if routes are not appropriately optimised using insightful and reliable data.
Traditional route management merely ensures managers have oversight of the drivers’ path. It does not guarantee that the chosen route is the most effective for fleet operations.
Issues with Multi-drop Delivery
In order to boost efficiency, the majority of logistics companies use multi-stop deliveries or pick-ups. Managers won’t need to send out several vehicles for the same job because one vehicle may serve multiple locations in this fashion.
Multi-stop deliveries become a burden when fleet management and route planning are done manually. This is due to the manual challenge of estimating time consumption between midpoints and load capacity.
Customer Satisfaction at Risk
As previously stated, managers cannot provide ETAs to additional supply chain nodes or end customers without real-time tracking. In order to keep customers informed and satisfied, the delivery system must become less seamless and more incident-based. Traditional route management places a greater emphasis on the driver than on operations or results.
How Multi-stop Route Planning is Made Possible by Vehicle Tracking Software
One of the major difficulties with manual trip management is completing multi-stop routes. It can be very difficult to determine which path will use how many resources because of how complicated the process might be. Fortunately, multi-stop route planning can be accomplished by fleet management software as long as it has access to the essential data:
- Sites: Access to specific geocodes for the locations concerned should be available to the software.
- Capacity: You must specify the load capacity of the truck and how much freight it must pick up from each location.
- Time Slots: To help software provide precise predicted ETAs, always enter the amount of time your driver must spend at each midpoint.
- Driving Time: To increase accuracy, software should be aware of how long it will take a vehicle to travel between two locations. However, all fleet management programmes record this crucial information.
How Trip Management Simplifies Delivery Using Fleet Management Software?
Systems for fleet management are used by logistics companies to streamline deliveries. For the sake of boosting business earnings and customer pleasure, they must make sure that every journey is as easy and efficient as feasible.
Here are some ways that vehicle tracking solutions might enhance logistics industry trip management.
- Pick the Shortest Path: Journey management solutions can determine the quickest and most effective route for each trip using automated methods, precise data insights, and calculations.
- PODs, ETAs, and Trip Status: The live status, expected arrival time, and delivery proof of each trip are all available to managers via real-time tracking in route management systems. The distribution process is greatly streamlined as a result.
- Route Deviation Alerts: Managers provide their drivers with specific routes for a reason. Managers receive prompt notifications if drivers depart from the planned routes so they may stop the loss caused by not using the most efficient routes
- Higher Stoppage Density: The software creates routes with the largest stoppage density when using a multi-stop route design. Vehicles can therefore make more stops and finish more duties on a single trip.
- Trip archiving: Software has the ability to save route data. Managers thereby receive preliminary information about how cars performed along particular routes. As a result, they can reduce the planning process by simply giving drivers a pre-planned route.
What Advantages Does Tour Management Automation Offer?
Yes, you’ve made an investment in a reputable fleet management software programme, and you’re now successfully managing your routes. Yes, it does cut down on administrative work and aid in speeding up and saving money on routes. But what tangible advantages do tour management offer the industry at large? In this area, let’s learn.
Automated Admin Tasks
They tend to consume too much administrative time, as we may infer from the part describing the drawbacks of conventional route management software. Instead, this time could be better spent organising fleet operations or monitoring the budget.
Therefore, managers benefit from the automation of admin tasks with the aid of tour management software. Managers receive pre-suggested routes via software rather than having to manually gather and analyse route data. The programme also does additional functions automatically, saving time and energy, like comprehending driver behaviour and fuel consumption.
Adaptive Dispatches
The most effective route must be planned, but it’s also important to consider the best time for the vehicle to travel that route. After all, due to heavy traffic, the same road may take a car four hours to go in the morning but six in the afternoon.
Dispatch operations can be very strategically planned with the aid of route management systems. According to dispatch and travel time, the software has the potential to save more resources even on the same route.
Automatic Delivery Proofs
Managers and the recipient can receive automatic evidence of delivery thanks to live-tracking in trip management tools.
Managers can be informed when the vehicle arrives at its destination since they know where it is and can be alerted when it departs from the planned path. In the event that a multi-stop route is planned, these proofs of delivery also function as real-time trip updates.
Resource Management
Resource optimization is not the main advantage of optimal route planning, but it is the biggest practical advantage. In the end, the routes are designed to consume the least amount of time and fuel for the car.
In addition to saving time and fuel, route planning can also save the following resources:
- Driver drowsiness
- Engine fitness
- Tire safety
- Greater delivery safety
Products that can be combustible, contaminated, or stolen include cigarettes, fuel, alcohol, and pharmaceuticals.
Therefore, managers must identify the safest routes using software and data analysis. The better for fleet management and operations the consignment, the vehicles, and the drivers travelling.
Lower Operating Costs
Obviously, the corporation reduces operational costs when it conserves resources. For instance, the largest fleet expense is fuel. Route design can save operational expenses by reducing the quantity of gasoline that vehicles use.
Saving time is one indirect way that operational costs can decline. A vehicle may wind up having space for two to three extra journeys per month for every hour saved on a single trip, which will affect the cost of operating new cars for the same purpose.
Enhanced Profits
Profits rise as operating costs decrease. The money is saved for the business if it is not used for operations, right?
Lower operational costs, less theft, improved customer relations, and efficient supply chain management all contribute to the company’s bottom line.
How Should You Pick the Best Route Planning Software For Your Logistics Company?
You are aware of the critical role route planning plays in resource optimization, client happiness, delivery quality, and company profitability. Therefore, you should make sure that the route management software you use is the ideal one for you.
Here are some key characteristics that every system enabling route planning in a fleet management software package should have. If not, investing in it is not worthwhile!
- Real-time Visibility: The software you use should provide real-time visibility, which means that vehicles should appear on a map as moving bullets rather than as buffering dots. The effectiveness of real-time vehicle tracking will determine how effective your fleet management system is for route monitoring.
- Geocoder Tools: The best route management software includes geocoder tools that enable managers to choose particular geocodes by merely entering address lines for target sites. As a result, locational information might be significantly more precise than it could be with inaccurately placed map pins.
- Route Archives: Your programme ought to feature a journey archive and historical data storage. The more data the software gathers, the better-analyzed routes it will recommend, and the more informative the reports provided.
- Scalability: Even if your fleet starts off with just 10, check to see if the software you select can support your operation if your fleet grows to 100 vehicles in a year.
- Support: Even if the product has the best features and functionality, it is useless if the developer doesn’t offer reliable technical assistance. After all, your problems ought to stay fixed immediately to avoid affecting your operations and to cause you the least downtime possible.
A Few Clicks Can Get You Resource Optimization!
The organisation can profit in several ways from resource preservation. First off, it undoubtedly lowers operating expenses. Secondly, it helps increase business profits.
So, why would you wait any longer and risk wasting massive tangible and intangible resources in your organization?
Use the fastest-growing telematics software in India, TrackoBit, to optimise your fleet’s resource use. Economic fleet management can be just a few clicks away; request a demo and see your profits boost for yourself!
