Automated Route Planning Explained: How to Tackle Your Daily Routing Needs

The best alternative to planning routes manually is using an automated route planning solution that can shave off your working hours. This method can help multiple transportation sectors such as delivery, HVAC, and emergency services.

In the modern world, there is a significant spike in automation for time-consuming processes that stands as an obstacle that keeps you from achieving true efficiency. This begs the question, why is automated route planning not the norm for all transportation businesses?

When a business starts to automate route planning, it can benefit in more ways than one. That is why in this article, we will look at what automated route planning is and how it can revolutionize the way businesses plan their routes forever.

What is Automated Route Planning?

Automated route planning refers to the process of using computer algorithms and software to optimize and generate optimal routes for transportation, delivery, or logistics operations. It eliminates the need for manual route planning by automatically considering factors like traffic conditions, delivery time windows, vehicle capacity, and multiple stops, resulting in efficient and cost-effective route plans.

Automating the traditional process of manually planning routes is what automated route planning is all about. This form of automation can be easily achieved when you use route planning and optimization software.

Using a route planner, your time spent on planning routes is not only shortened but you also get optimized routes every single time. These optimized routes get you to your destinations in the least amount of time possible and allow you to make the most of your time. 

With such automated route planning software, businesses can not only optimize routes but also garner additional abilities to improve efficiency. Plus, processes such as fleet management can also be refined given that you choose the right route planner.

6 Major Benefits of Automated Route Planning

Well-planned routes help a business with more than just faster deliveries. These routes hold a lot of lesser-known benefits that can greatly help delivery operations and business reputation. Let us look at these benefits in detail to learn why route planning is essential.

1. Lower fuel costs

One of the greatest benefits of automated route planning is the ability to lower fuel costs drastically for any business that performs multiple trips. Regardless of your methods to save money on gas, if your route is not well planned, your fleet will have greater fuel consumption. 

An automated route planning solution will instantly recognize excessively long routes and will rearrange them to make them as fuel efficient as possible. Businesses have been able to nearly cut their fuel consumption in half when they switched to an automated route planner.

2. Get accurate estimated time of arrival 

The greatest challenge faced by dispatchers and fleet managers is planning routes without knowing when each stop would be reached. This is never an issue when you use route planning software, as it gives you highly accurate delivery times for each and every stop.

Knowing the time when a stop will be reached allows you to plan other stops around it and see if the given stops will be reached at all. An accurate estimated time of arrival can also help with other aspects such as customer experience. 

3. Increased customer satisfaction 

When you have accurate estimated times of arrival, both you and your customers are less worried because of the newfound knowledge. Businesses know that one of the most displeasing experiences for customers is undoubtedly delivery delays. 

The optimized routes combined with the accurate estimated time of arrival ensure that your deliveries are always on time. This can be invaluable if your business is looking to increase customer satisfaction and retention.  

4. Boosted productivity

With these highly efficient routes at hand, you might even be able to squeeze in some extra stops on your route within the same time frame. For example, a regular route would be able to fit in 130 stops in 8 hours meanwhile, a planned route would allow 150 in the same 8 hours.

Such optimization ability is why businesses are able to keep improving delivery performance with the passing of time. This form of route optimization can also help you reduce the costs of hiring extra delivery drivers to cover a few extra stops.

5. Save working hours

Anyone that has attempted planning a route for multiple stops will tell you exactly how much of a chore it is. The manual route planning process is one that is unarguably one of the most strenuous and time-consuming processes in the delivery process.

To add insult to injury, even after hours of manually planning routes, you still end up with a route that is unpredictable and unreliable. Seeing this tragic wastage of time, an automated route planning software justifies its cost with ease to any business that may need it. 

6. Better fleet management ability 

With the optimal routes at hand you can more effectively divide the workload among the drivers in your fleet. It enables you to divide workload based on accurate metrics instead of random guesses making your delivery process smoother and faster. 

Some route planners also allow you to have features such as live driver tracking that lets you monitor the progress of your drivers throughout the day. Usually, you wouldn’t need any tracking hardware for this to work as the route planning apps can usually connect via a mobile device. 

Is Automated Route Planning Software Better Than Manual Route Planning?

A routing and scheduling software will outperform manual route planning in all measurable criteria as it has a larger set of data to use for your routing needs. If there was even one aspect where route planning software was inferior, route planning businesses would have to go extinct. 

For optimal route planning you would have to take into account multiple factors that are not always possible in manual route planning. With the unrelenting brutality of constantly changing customer demands, manual route planning and optimization simply fall short. 

If an automated route planning software only reduced planning time, it would still be on the list for multiple businesses around the world. If you choose the right route planning software, you could enjoy a whole host of additional features that take your delivery process to the next level.

Optimize Unlimited Routes with a Single Click on Upper

Choosing the best route planning software was a very confusing process before Upper stepped into the industry. Infuse the already amazing perks of using a route planner with the additional brilliant features from Upper and you have truly mind-blowing software to plan routes on.

If you are wondering what Upper has brought to the table, then you are in for a treat. Apart from the fantastic route planning abilities of Upper, you can utilize features such as Excel import, route scheduling, proof of delivery, and one-click dispatch to level up your routing process.

Upper blows the competition out of the water with sheer utility and value for the business that requires efficient routes. Step up your delivery management process with the best route planning software in existence and witness the wave of efficiency hit your business.

Conclusion

Businesses around the world know that business success is achieved either by refining existing practices or increasing the cost of your services. Faced with this dilemma, businesses often look for ways to boost their future performance by any means necessary. 

For businesses that perform multiple trips in a day, automated route planning is the best solution to this challenge. In fact, no other solution is as good at lowering costs and boosting performance simultaneously. If you are exploring options for the best route planner, Upper is all you need.

With Upper by your side you can rest easy knowing that your routes have been made perfect by an automated process. The utility of Upper is best seen first-hand, which is why you must try our 7-day free trial.