Delivery route optimization: what software really takes into account

“Route optimization” is one of those phrases everyone uses to mean very different things. For a sat nav it means finding the fastest road from A to B. For a transport company with ten vehicles and eighty stops a day it means a lot more.

Here’s what route optimization software really has to take into account to be useful to anyone delivering with trucks and vans.

Not one route, but many at once

The real problem isn’t “in what order do I visit these stops”, but “which vehicle visits which stops, and in what order”. The two decisions have to be made together: a good assignment with a bad stop order, or the other way round, still leads to long routes and missed times.

Good software considers every available vehicle at the same time and spreads the work between them.

Time windows

Every customer has their own times: the warehouse that only receives from 8 to 12, the shop that doesn’t want unloading after opening, the building site that closes at 4 p.m. A shorter route that arrives outside the window is worthless.

Software has to treat time windows as constraints, not preferences: a route that misses them isn’t a valid route. And it has to take into account the working hours of each vehicle and its driver too.

Loading space

Every vehicle has a limit: pallets, metres of loading space or another unit. Along the route the free space changes all the time, because goods go on at each pickup and come off at each delivery.

That’s why it isn’t enough to check that the day’s total fits the vehicle: it has to be checked stop by stop. A route is only valid if the load never exceeds the available space at any point.

Linked pickups and deliveries

Many transport companies don’t just leave from a depot: they pick goods up from one customer and deliver them to another. In that case the software has to know that:

• the pickup and its delivery are on the same vehicle;
• the pickup comes before the delivery.

It sounds trivial, but many route tools built for couriers don’t handle it: they only think about deliveries leaving from a single warehouse.

Roads suited to trucks

The fastest road for a car isn’t always passable for a heavy vehicle: height and weight limits, transit bans, old town centres. The travel times used by the software must be those of a real truck, on roads it can actually take.

The unexpected during the day

A perfect plan at 7 a.m. may not be perfect any more at 11. Useful software lets you add an urgent order and reorganize only the stops still to do, starting from where the vehicles are at that moment.

The result has to reach the drivers

The best optimization in the world is useless if it stays on the planner’s screen. Every route has to reach its driver’s phone, in the calculated order, and the planner has to see the status of deliveries in real time.

In short

When you evaluate route optimization software, ask whether it considers all of these together:

• assigning orders to vehicles and ordering the stops;
• customer time windows and vehicle hours;
• loading space stop by stop;
• linked pickups and deliveries;
• roads and times suited to trucks;
• same-day urgent orders;
• sending routes to drivers.

Metis takes all of this into account: press Optimize routes and you get the routes for all your vehicles, ready on every driver’s phone. To work out where to start, read how to plan delivery routes too, or request a demo and watch it work on your own orders.