Planning transport in Excel: limits and alternatives

Excel is the most common planning tool in small and medium transport companies. It’s already installed, everyone knows how to use it and it adapts to any way of working. For years, it’s enough. Then one day the planning file becomes the most fragile part of the business.

Why Excel works (at first)

To be fair, Excel is there for good reasons.

• It’s cheap and already on the computer.
• It’s flexible: an extra column for the time, a colour for urgent orders, a sheet for each day.
• You know it: there’s nothing to learn and nobody to train.

With a few vehicles and regular customers, a well-made sheet and an experienced person running it are a decent solution.

Where Excel stops being enough

Problems arrive when the orders, the vehicles or the people touching the file grow.

It doesn’t optimize anything

Excel keeps the data tidy, but it doesn’t decide anything. The order of the stops, which vehicle takes which order, whether a route meets every time window: the planner works it out in their head. With 15 or 20 stops per vehicle nobody can weigh every alternative, so the same old routes get repeated even when they aren’t the best.

It doesn’t know the roads

The sheet doesn’t know how long it takes to get from one customer to the next in a truck at 8 a.m. Estimates are based on experience, and when the expert is on holiday you’re flying blind.

It doesn’t check loading space

Whether the van still has room after the third pickup is something you have to work out. A mistake here only shows up at the warehouse, with the driver ready to leave.

It doesn’t reach the drivers

The route then has to be printed, photographed or read out over the phone. If something changes during the day, every driver has to be called one by one, and the planner doesn’t know how deliveries are going until someone picks up.

It depends on one person

Often “only the person who built it knows how to use it”: formulas, colours and habits nobody else understands. That’s a risk for the business, not just a nuisance.

Alternatives to Excel for delivery planning

There are usually three ways to go.

1. A full transport management system (TMS): it does a lot, from invoicing to transport documents, but it’s often expensive, slow to set up and clumsy for day-to-day planning.
2. A sat nav or route app: it helps the individual driver, but doesn’t decide how to split orders across vehicles.
3. Delivery planning software: it does one thing, the one Excel can’t, which is assigning orders to vehicles and optimizing routes.

What to look for in planning software

If you’re thinking about leaving Excel, here are the questions to ask during a demo:

• Does it handle time windows and the loading space of each vehicle, together?
• Does it use roads suited to trucks, or only car routes?
• Does it send the route to the driver’s phone with no steps in between?
• Does it handle a same-day urgent order without redoing everything?
• Is it in the cloud, with nothing to install, and quick to set up?
• Can you manage users yourself, adding or removing planners and drivers?

These are the same questions we started from when building Metis: cloud software that assigns orders to your trucks and vans, optimizes delivery routes and sends them to every driver’s phone. You can keep using Excel for everything else; for planning, there’s a faster way. Request a demo and try it on your own orders.