FedEx vs UPS vs Google Maps: What is the Optimal Route Planner for Deliveries?

Being able to innovate is a never-ending task in today’s fast-paced world. This is especially true when it comes to deliveries. People always need to send important packages and documents from A to B regularly. The demand for speedy delivery makes delivery services an essential tool for all ranges of businesses. However, getting packages delivered on time is not as simple as hopping in a truck and driving: there are several ways people plan deliveries, including navigation software.

Here, we’ll look at how big players like FedEx, UPS, and Google Maps plan trips and optimize routes. In this article, we are curious to explore which of these companies can be called the “optimal route planner.” We’ll also provide a comparison of their route planning software so you can choose the best one for your company.

What is Route Optimization?

This is the process of finding the best driving directions for a set of stops. By best, we mean fastest and most cost-efficient, but it’s not as simple as getting from A to B in record time.

Rather, route optimization aims to minimize the mileage or to drive time for routes with several stops. It factors in several important elements, such as:

• The number of addresses
• The number of vehicles in the fleet
• Available delivery windows
• Route order, steps, and destinations
• Features, time constraints, and other options like avoiding toll roads and traffic incidents updates

Why do businesses need to use the most efficient routing technology? Because route optimization software can drastically reduce the amount of time, it takes for a whole set of deliveries to be made.

Little improvements to speed and efficiency can positively affect all manner of things:

• Reduced mileage
• Reduced duel uses
• Fewer carbon emissions
• Better customer service
• Quicker orders
• Higher volume of sales and accounts
• Increased productivity
• Lower pricing for the user
• Greater market share

Route mapping is essential for all businesses, not just delivery services. That’s because inefficient software leads to much higher labor and transportation costs, which can quickly surpass a company’s revenue. However, a route planner app gets you where you need to go in the shortest amount of time.

For this reason, it’s important for any delivery business or company that relies on the delivery of products to use an excellent planning tool.

Why is Route Optimization So Important?

Planning a trip is easy – but finding the one that will be most efficient when visiting multiple addresses can bring up all sorts of problems. In this section, we’ll look at two of the biggest route planner problems you need to overcome for effective and efficient delivery.

The Traveling Salesman Problem

The Traveling Salesman Problem poses the following question: Given a list of locations and the distances between each pair of locations, what is the shortest route available that visits each location exactly once and then returns to the first location?

Route planners address this dilemma. Drivers or field salespeople receive the best directions to cover all locations with the shortest path possible.

The Vehicle Routing Problem

Dantzig and Ramser formulated the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in 1959. It is a method of establishing optimized route planning for delivery drivers. It concerns with how the total cost of delivery can be minimized through planning a route in the following scenario:

• One single depot where each vehicle must start and end.
• A set of customers at different stops that are expecting deliveries.
• A fleet of vehicles servicing a particular location.

What Does Optimized Route Planning Look Like?

Here we take a look at some of the route planning industry’s biggest players and how they map out their route optimization. We’ll focus on software for delivery service with multiple stops.

UPS

According to UPS, it ships over 19.1 million packages in more than 220 countries every single day.

To overcome logistical problems and route planning issues on such a huge scale, UPS uses advanced route planning software and a fleet management system called Orion. The UPS delivery planner is based on an advanced algorithm that creates the best multi-stop route map for a driver. It gets its data from routes previously driven by its drivers. The data aims to find out:

• Where drivers are losing most of their time on any particular multi-stop route
• Why they lose time there
• Whether any alternatives have proven to save time

This data is captured through drivers’ mobile devices, GPS tracking, and vehicle sensors. It provides them with valuable insights as to where improvements can be made. UPS can then optimize its operations, as well as offer better service to their customers.

The latest updates to their software give drivers real-time updates and adapt directions accordingly. This means that a delivery driver will have an initial route plan at the beginning of the day, but it may change as the software takes into account congestion and road closures in real-time.

ORION software has reduced the miles traveled by UPS drivers by around 100 million miles. According to UPS, this is a cut of around 100,00 metric tonnes of C02 emissions and 10 million gallons of fuel.

FedEx

FedEx Ground and Home Delivery services are branches of the FedEx corporation that deal with the last-mile ground shipping deliveries in the U.S.

FedEx sorts deliveries by region, and independent operators for FedEx Ground manage a fleet of drivers for each region. The company recently launched new map tools and route optimization improvements to make each multi-stop route more efficient. This is called dynamic route optimization (DRO).

DRO is designed to:

• Provide large delivery teams with real-time data on the best routes to use when delivering their packages.
• Balance out trips so that one delivery service van is never half loaded while another is crowded.

Google Maps

One of the most well-known route planner apps. This easy-to-use map is simple: enter your starting point and destination, and it will show you all of the routes available, ranked in order of speed. Here’s a breakdown of how it works:

• The app locates the latitude and longitude coordinates of the two addresses or stops you’ve entered and then pinpoints them on the map.
• All available routes between the two points are singled out.
• Google considers the distance of the route and real-time traffic conditions to find you the fastest route.
• Lastly, it will display the best route to you and show you some alternatives that vary in the time they will take or the overall mileage.

That’s why Google Maps is a simple route planner and one of the most popular route planner apps available to everyone. It can easily find you the shortest journey between two or more stops.

However, it will not show you an optimized route between multiple stops. Sure, it will demonstrate the fastest route from A to B to C, but it can’t show the shortest route from A to Z. Google’s route planner is not designed to put stops in the optimum order for efficiency. Users must plot their own path and then determine the most efficient order themselves.

For more information, please check out:
How to Use Google Maps for Route Planning?

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Which Route Planner Will You Choose?

So, which route planner is best?

Google Maps is great for individuals to use every day to plan routes from A to B. However, it cannot be considered a fully-fledged route optimizer because it doesn’t stop in the most efficient order for you.

Meanwhile, FedEx and UPS use their own advanced routing software to optimize routes. They constantly update their software and can’t really be separated from one another when it comes to efficiency and technology offered.

In conclusion, the best route planner depends on your business’s needs. If you need cutting-edge technology that’s constantly updated, you may be interested in learning more about Orion and DRO.