How Does Route Planning Software Help Businesses To Schedule Food Delivery?

The food delivery business is rapidly growing, and slowly the food delivery markets are getting back to the pre-pandemic levels.

With the rise in digital restaurant orders, the demand in the industry has surged by 63%. The online food delivery segment can cross over $343.80 billion market cap by 2022.

If you are in the food delivery business, there are multiple ways to tackle the rising demands while delivering quality customer service.

But one of the most effective techniques you can use is advanced software to schedule food delivery and increase efficiency. But how to do that? Let’s find out.

The Complexities of Food Delivery

Before discussing how to effectively schedule your food delivery drivers for better productivity. Let’s analyze the core of the problem and understand what complexities you can face in your food delivery that initiates the optimization move.

1. Order volumes differ per hour and location

Your restaurant or food delivery business’s target audience wants to make different food orders at different delivery times, and you don’t want to lose the business opportunity. It becomes difficult to schedule the number of delivery drivers at the right place and at the right time to handle the customers’ demands.

For example, lunch deliveries in business areas and evening deliveries in residential areas are common patterns recognized in the food delivery segment.

These generalized patterns don’t help handle the diverse demand over multiple delivery areas. It becomes different for food businesses to coordinate with drivers with different starting locations, preferences, and contract types to match the dynamic food demands of customers.

And if the scheduling is done manually, then the quality and effectiveness of the food delivery segment drop drastically.

2. Maximizing productivity and minimizing idle time

The approach of businesses to keep more drivers on the road to boost productivity can be effective only if every driver is occupied with work. But this scenario is hard to achieve.

You need to decide who you want to send where and effectively manage the drivers’ productivity out of your driver workforce.

Consider factors like travel time between deliveries, the number of deliveries made by drivers, the driver’s location compared to the delivery location, and decent rest breaks for the drivers before selecting a driver to deliver the order.

These aspects are hard to achieve using manually-calculated routes. You need to integrate automation into your delivery process to streamline your workforce management and achieve maximum productivity for your on-ground workforce.

3. No week is ever the same

No matter how well you analyze the patterns of your food delivery orders or how great your forecast is, there will be outliers that can be handled with powerful systems integrated into the business ecosystem.

External factors like traffic, weather conditions, and events like COVID-19 can influence the delivery and the demand of the food delivery industry. Every day can be different in the food delivery industry. You need to analyze the new data sets to minimize the external damage factors that can bring to your business.

Your drivers need access to the best technologies that can help them break the complexities and streamline their delivery flow. It can help you avoid delayed or failed deliveries to ensure that the quality of the customer experience remains intact.

Managing your logistics and efficient route planning using a user-friendly route optimization tool can help you improve business efficiency and scale the food delivery business. It can also automate the scheduling process to minimize errors and human intervention.

4. Compliance and employee happiness

You need to ensure that the delivery business is compliant with the local labor laws and provides meals to drivers, and paid transparently for the hours of work they put in, among other factors, are also considered.

Businesses find it hard to keep their food delivery workforce happy and lose the skilled workforce, hindering the business’s efficiency and effectiveness.

It helps to keep your employees happy and ensure their maximum productivity for better results. You assist your employees in minimizing their effort using the right tools and increase their work to scale their incentives.

Choosing the right technology can help you create a robust communication channel in your food delivery ecosystem and streamline your business operations to achieve your desired targets and numbers.

Now that you understand the complexities a food delivery business can face in managing its employees and ensuring automated scheduling. Technology plays a critical role in assisting the business in streamlining the food delivery workflow.

The Role of Technology in Scheduling Food Delivery Business

Technology plays a decisive role in managing the schedule of your food delivery employees and ensuring that they work with maximum effectiveness to deliver the best business results.

Integrating the right technologies can minimize business roadblocks, help your employees bypass the hiccups caused by multiple external factors, and improve the entire customer experience.

You can provide a quality workspace to your delivery drivers and attract the best talent in the industry to ensure that your food delivery business stands out from the rest.

Technology can help you get the best ROI and be future-ready for managing the rising demand and scalability of your food delivery business. You can achieve your targets and strengthen your business presence.

But out of multiple software and technologies like customer relationship manager, logistic manager, and inventory manager, among others, only efficient route planning software can help you automate the food delivery employees scheduling.

You can create schedules in advance, consider employee preferences, improve service levels or task alignment, and adhere to the rules and laws with the help of a powerful delivery route planner software.

That’s not it. 

The benefits of a delivery route planner are not limited to scheduling your employee’s schedule. Have a look at the plethora of benefits it can offer.

Benefits of Route Planning Software

1. Match the rising customer expectations

The changing consumer behavior in the industry is creating multiple issues for food delivery businesses to ensure timely and accurate deliveries to their target audience. A delivery route planning solution can deliver the requirements and help you achieve your goals with no compromise on the quality of the service.

Multiple leading delivery route planners use geocoding to help you generate the shortest route by analyzing different external scenarios like ETAs and traffic movement and assist delivery drivers in delivering to the correct address within no time.

The real-time tracking option provided by the top delivery route planners can enable the customers to like their WhatsApp/email/SMS to track deliveries and get the best customer experience.

The advanced functionalities of a professional route planner can deliver a tailored and optimized food delivery experience to customers in quick succession while ensuring the quality of food remains intact.

2. Minimize delivery cost for the driver

Route planning software can help you monitor the efficiency of the vehicles and reduce fuel costs. The software can help your drivers to access the optimized alternative routes to reach the destination quicker by avoiding traffic jams and complex routes to save fuel.

With optimized delivery routes, your food delivery drivers can increase their work output to help them save more fuel and increase their business profits.

The overall operational cost of your food delivery business will decrease, and you can scale your business with finesse.

3. Real-time visibility

You can get a bird’s eye view of the delivery operation of your food delivery workforce that can help you ensure there’s no bottleneck in the business operations. Once the customers order food online, the delivery driver can complete the scheduled delivery, and you can check your business workflow within a few clicks.

You can make real-time decisions with clear ecosystem visibility to ensure quick and agile delivery for better results. You can track challenges or deviations and deal with them properly to ensure no hindrance in the delivery operations.

4. Reduces manual intervention

Delivery route optimization platform minimizes the manual intervention and helps you automate the management process that can help you scale your food delivery operations and achieve your business outcomes.

You can make changes and update the existing schedule or workflow that can help quickly notify the workforce to avoid delayed or failed deliveries. Reduced manual intervention can help your workforce focus on the core business operation and save time and energy for better productivity.

Automation of the redundant processes can increase the team’s efficiency, minimize errors, and ensure that your customers get the hot and healthy food they ordered.

5. Leverage data

Data has a critical role in helping you scale your food delivery business. You can predict and forecast the customers’ eating habits by leveraging the data to help you manage your workforce and delivery operation in an organized manner.

A delivery route planner can help you extract the performance data of the workforce and your business to help you optimize your existing business by analyzing different elements for better decision-making.

These are the top benefits of route optimization software that can help you achieve with your food delivery business.

But which delivery route planner app is best for your business requirement and goals?

There are powerful route planning tools available in the market, but we have filtered and selected the best for your food delivery management.

Upper Route Planner Has Got You Covered

Upper Route Planner is a powerful route planning software that can help you optimize multi-stop delivery paths and help your on-ground workforce follow the shortest distance and save time, energy, and fuel.

Within a few clicks, you can make desired changes to your business operations, delivery schedules, and other segments to adjust your business to maximize efficiency.

The intuitive and easy-to-use UI/UX can enable you to achieve quick last-mile delivery processes and provide your customers with a quality food delivery experience.

You can handle up to 500 delivery addresses simultaneously and save up to 95% of the route planning time using Upper Route Planner.

The software can help you extract tailored performance reports for in-depth analytics and help you optimize your business operations. Your workforce can check the scheduled orders and manage the order delivery effectively.

It can help you establish a robust communication channel between your management and your on-ground delivery fleets. Smooth communication can minimize the friction in your workflow and assist you in achieving your business goals.

So, what’s making you wait? Get a free 7-day trial and get hands-on experience with the tool for achieving your business goals.