How to plan delivery routes for trucks and vans

Every evening, in many transport companies, someone sits down with a stack of orders and an Excel sheet and decides who goes where the next day. It takes experience, but it almost always follows the same steps. Laying them out helps you do it better, and shows which ones can be automated.

1. Collect everything you need before you start

A route can only be planned well if the starting data is complete. For each order you need at least:

• the pickup and delivery addresses, written so they can be found on a map;
• the time windows: when the customer can load or receive the goods;
• the size of the goods: pallets, metres of loading space or whatever unit you use every day.

And for each vehicle: its loading space, the driver’s working hours and where it starts in the morning. It sounds obvious, but most problems during the day start here: a forgotten time, a wrong address, a van with no room for the last pallet.

2. Assign orders to vehicles

The first instinct is to split by area: “Marco does the north, Luca does the south”. That works as long as the areas are balanced. One day with lots of orders in the north and Marco finishes late while Luca is back by mid-afternoon.

When you assign orders, keep an eye on three things at once:

1. loading space: the total size must fit the vehicle, remembering that pickups and deliveries alternate along the route;
2. time windows: two customers 40 km apart who both want their goods at 8 sharp can’t be on the same vehicle;
3. the type of vehicle: a truck can’t get into every old town centre, and a van can’t carry everything.

3. Decide the order of the stops

Once you know who does what, you need to choose the order of the visits. Gut feeling helps up to 5 or 6 stops; beyond that there are too many combinations to weigh in your head. With 10 stops there are millions of possible orders, and the one that looks most natural on the map often misses a time window or makes you double back.

A few practical rules:

• a pickup always comes before its delivery, on the same vehicle;
• start with the tightest windows: they constrain everything else;
• use real travel times, not straight-line distance: for a truck, ring roads and narrow streets make all the difference.

This is where route optimization software makes the biggest difference: it tries the combinations for you and finds an order that respects time windows and loading space.

4. Get the route to the drivers

A well-planned route is no use if the driver gets it on a printout or in a voice message at 6 a.m. Drivers need the stops on their phone, in the right order, with address, time and what to load or unload. And the planner needs to see, during the day, which stops are done and which aren’t.

5. Be ready for the unexpected

No day goes exactly to plan. A same-day urgent order comes in, a customer moves a time, a vehicle gets stuck in traffic. Good planning isn’t planning that never changes, but planning you can update quickly without starting over.

From Excel to delivery planning software

All these steps can be done by hand, and many companies have done them that way for years. The limit comes when orders grow: the evening planning session gets longer and mistakes pile up. We cover this in the article on planning transport in Excel.

That’s what Metis was built for: load your orders, press Optimize routes and Metis assigns deliveries to your trucks and vans, decides the order of the stops respecting time windows and loading space, and sends each route to its driver’s phone. If you’d like to see it on a day like yours, request a demo.