Same-day urgent orders: how to fit them in without redoing the whole route

It’s 10 a.m., the vehicles left two hours ago and the phone rings: a customer needs a pickup and delivery by this afternoon. Saying no means losing a job, and maybe the customer. Saying yes means reworking routes that are already on the road.

Same-day urgent orders are one of the most stressful moments for a planner. Here’s how to handle them methodically.

Why an urgent order is so hard to fit in

The morning’s routes were built on a balance: customer times, space on the vehicles, drivers’ working hours. One more order breaks that balance in three ways:

• space: the nearest vehicle might not have room for the extra goods, at least until its next delivery;
• time: adding two stops pushes back every stop after them, and some customers could end up outside their time window;
• position: the vehicles are no longer at the depot, and one that looks “nearby” on paper could be across town.

Questions to ask before you say yes

1. Where is each vehicle right now? Not where the plan said it would be, but where it really is.
2. What’s left to do? Completed stops no longer count: only the rest of the route matters.
3. Who has loading space at the moment they’d reach the pickup?
4. Who can do it without breaking the times of deliveries already promised?

Answering these by hand, with four or five vehicles on the road, takes phone calls, maps and quite a few minutes. Meanwhile, the vehicles keep moving.

Reorganize only what’s left

The most common mistake is wanting to redo the whole plan. In reality, the part of the day already done shouldn’t be touched, and neither should the stop the driver is heading to right now: changing it halfway only creates confusion.

The right way is to:

• keep completed stops and the current one as they are;
• start from each vehicle’s current position, not from the depot;
• reorder only the stops still to do, slotting the urgent pickup and delivery in where they cost least;
• check that loading space and time windows are still respected.

Tell the driver without stopping them

Once the new route is decided, the driver needs to know. A phone call while driving isn’t the best way: it can be forgotten or misunderstood. It’s much better for the updated route to arrive straight on their phone, with the new stops clearly marked and the others moving down a place. The planner, meanwhile, sees on the map that the update has arrived and how the day is going.

How Metis does it

In Metis you add the urgent order and run the optimization again. Metis starts from each vehicle’s current position, leaves the current stop as it is and reorganizes only the stops still to do, respecting time windows and loading space. The updated route reaches the driver’s phone in real time: new stops are marked, the others show the number they had before.

That way, saying yes to an urgent order becomes a decision of a few minutes, not a morning of phone calls. If you’d like to see it on a case like yours, request a demo.