Route Planning Software Can Help Your Goods Delivery Business Scale
We are all aware that Planning routes manually is a time-consuming and ineffective option when your drivers have hundreds, if not thousands, of locations or clients to visit. Driver salary and fuel expenses alone account for 59.8 percent of total operating costs per mile in several sectors. As a result, even little changes to your driver’s routes can not only help you deliver items or serve your clients faster but can also have a major influence on your bottom line. With the right route optimization technologies, your company might save up to 20% on mileage and increase order capacity by up to 100% without expanding its fleet.
In this article, we’ll go through how Bharat Software’s route planning software is assisting delivery businesses in scaling all over India, From driver and fuel management to route optimization techniques, a full-fledged online transport management system that benefits your business is booming!
Optimizing last-mile delivery operations is critical for every fleet management organization, large or small, to ensure profitability and long-term business success. Last-mile delivery is when an item is delivered from a local distribution point to the final customer’s location.
However, it is a really difficult element; here’s why:
Last-mile delivery is a challenging sector to master due to difficulties in maintaining the correct infrastructure, managing deadlines, and dealing with unanticipated events. As a result, more than 61 percent of logistics organizations consider it the most inefficient supply chain procedure. It is also a time-consuming and resource-intensive procedure. Last-mile delivery contributes to more than 53% of overall transportation expenditure throughout the freight business, from conveying individual cargo to tough locations with different routes to high labor expenses and more. To develop brand loyalty and client retention, efficient last-mile delivery service necessitates speed, accuracy, and time management. A slight interruption in service, on the other hand, can have a significant impact on your business, since 56 percent of clients would not use the same service provider again if they have a less-than-satisfactory service experience.
Understanding The Urgency of Route Optimization
Even though last-mile delivery operations include the shortest paths of any section of the supply chain, they can be highly difficult if manual route planning and mapping are still used.
This is where your company requires a route optimization system that can react to changes in route and road bumps better than a human operator. Technically, route optimization is the automated process of selecting the most cost-effective way between two sites depending on parameters such as road conditions, delivery time frame, and several stops. Furthermore, If your go for Bharat software’s route planning system, then you are benefitted with:-
Cutting down your costs: Cost-effective
Fuel is a substantial contributor to transportation expenses, and when fuel prices fluctuate, delivery companies are frequently forced to raise their service charges. As a result, any increase in fuel costs raises the entire cost of transportation, resulting in higher product pricing.
Efficient route optimization algorithms provide the best routes for each vehicle with the fewest stops possible, resulting in fewer miles driven, less idling, and lower fuel consumption. While vehicles that take the shortest available route spend less time on the road, experience less wear and tear, have lower maintenance expenses, and so pay less for last-mile delivery.
Route optimization can help you save money without reducing service quality or breaching any restrictions by factoring in all expenditures, from hourly salaries to mileage (and everything in between). It also assists you in optimizing your fleet operation, allowing each driver to fulfill more orders or service calls, hence improving your income and profitability. When these benefits are projected on a monthly or yearly basis, they can add up to significant savings.
Planning Precisely Without Lacking Behind
Daily, our staff works hours arranging and reorganizing people, calendars, shifts, deliveries, and appointments with goods forwarding management systems. You may reduce the planning step from hours to minutes by using route optimization technologies. Order lists in CSV or Excel formats may be immediately imported into Bharat Software Solutions and automatically assigned to drivers depending on availability and needs.
Schedules may be created for your company up to 5 weeks in advance, resulting in improved long-term planning. Advanced delivery route planning software, such as Bharat Software’s Route planning software, allows you to plan months ahead of time.
It also takes into account staff availability with its accounting management system (holidays, PTO), lunch breaks, controlled driving breaks, consumer availability (for example, only Tuesdays and Thursdays), deadlines, and other variables. This may appear to be a danger because many things can change before the delivery or service date, but it is not. Next-generation route optimization systems also allow you to swiftly react to unforeseen occurrences such as client cancellations or vehicle breakdowns and replan the whole schedule. Long-term planning allows your company to determine where it has the potential to develop and scale its operations, resulting in reduced turnover and larger profit margins.
Guarantee Your Customer Satisfaction
Your modern business is in jeopardy: client reviews have a greater impact on your success or failure than ever before. In 2019, 90% of consumers utilized the internet to find a local business, and 82% reviewed customer reviews before making a purchase choice.
Reviews should be important to more than just e-commerce behemoths like Amazon. They influence all types of consumer-facing enterprises. If you want potential clients to put their money in your hands, you must have a realistic and favorable web reputation. Real-time ETAs, tracking, and SMS and email alerts provided ahead of deliveries or service calls assist you in avoiding delays, failed deliveries, or postponed appointments.
As a result, client happiness and brand loyalty improve. With us, you can increase the frequency with which your drivers arrive on time and avoid botched deliveries. Keep your clients pleased while also reducing unwanted support contacts, such as the “are you guys here yet?” phone calls that most service organizations receive every day.
Reduces Downtime
Manual operations such as submitting work orders, calculating loading times and driver work hours, and preparing operational schedules can be extremely time-consuming for a delivery company. A good route planning software will schedule flexible delivery schedules and postpone the cut-off period for accepting client orders. This way, you can accept and fulfill orders without difficulty. You also don’t need to enter all of the variables because the system distributes cars and provides efficient routes for your delivery workers automatically. Route optimization also entails dynamically changing routes in response to new data to decrease operational costs and improve downtime. When clients receive their items on the schedule, you increase their pleasure and develop a brand reputation.
Increases Productivity
Deliveries should be assigned to appropriate delivery agents that have enough work hours available due to route optimization. You may also save time and enhance production by increasing the number of deliveries in each shift. Fleet operations managers can also expand the number of shifts available to collect up returns in the same delivery, lowering third-party costs.
Improves Driver Morale
Drivers may prevent avoidable delays and hazards by optimizing their routes. This boosts their confidence on the road.
Furthermore, route optimization takes into account driver breaks to ensure that they have adequate time to recharge. With a happy crew, you can be more productive and expand your firm.
Increases Brand Loyalty
Route optimization enables you to execute on-time deliveries while providing precise ETAs and real-time notifications. Route optimization enhances your savings without compromising service quality by factoring in all expenditures, from hourly salaries to mileage. The route planning software guarantees that your consumers receive up-to-date information. This results in a more happy consumer base, which promotes retention.
Make Your Last Minute Re-planning Without Wasting Time
Last-minute route adjustments are unavoidable, and manually editing several driver itineraries on the fly is a monumental undertaking.
That is why, in 2021, dynamic planning. The immediate and automated recalculation of routes to reflect real-world changes will be required. Late orders, cancellations, drivers calling in ill, or clients asking other delivery addresses) are just a few of the many variables that may derail a well-planned schedule in an instant.
When you design your route ahead of time, you must be able to replan and manage your fleet of drivers on the go. When a driver calls in sick or an order comes in at the last minute, this system will evaluate the availability and distribute the new tasks equitably across your fleet based on their current location, capacity, and route, rather than overwhelming a few drivers.
Employee Retention
One of the quick procedures that even untrained route managers or planners can execute manually. After all, you’re only drawing lines on a map to divide up the duties.
How do you now divide deliveries and service calls among your drivers? If your company is like others, you set it up geographically, with each driver having their delivery or service region.
It’s simple to generate uneven workloads in which certain drivers handle many more deliveries than others and must routinely work extra. Or when your most costly driver is compensated to sit in his or her vehicle and wait. All of these issues are addressed through optimizing routing, which incorporates them into the original planning phase. You can achieve a decent work-life balance for all of your drivers by fairly distributing orders throughout your whole fleet operations. This may make or break staff retention, which is a problem in many key sectors.
The Benefit of Bharat Software Solutions’ Route Planning Software
We offer an all-inclusive last-mile delivery and dispatch solution that includes precise scheduling, optimal resource usage, and the ability to control all processes from a single dashboard. Businesses may use our software solution to handle assignments more efficiently, manage cars in real-time, and make smarter decisions based on reliable performance indicators which ensure your delivery business to scale up while cutting down on your expenses and costs. The transport accounting management system and goods forwarding management system provide you a better understanding of an effective workforce saving time, money, and efforts in one place providing complete satisfaction to your clients.
Editorial Staff at Bharat Software Solutions is a team of transport management system development.