Delivery Route Planning Software

These are all the other factors to consider when choosing delivery route planning and route optimisation software for multiple drops:

• Sequencing - Multiple Stops

  Will the delivery route planning software automatically place the deliveries and stops in an order that minimises distance while considering your customer's requirements?

  Descartes' multiple stop route planning software considers all previous orders in the system and resources available before offering the optimal and possible delivery slots for any new orders. These can either be selectedautomatically or manually by the load planner or offered to the customer for self-selection online depending upon your sales solution.

  

• Swapping

  Can the delivery route planning software easily move stops between routes, vehicles or days whilst still considering customer, vehicle and driver requirements?

  This is a simple click, drag and drop in Descartes' delivery route planning system, automatically updating the route information.

  

• Pick-up and Drop-off

  When an order is associated with two locations (picking up a product from one location and delivering it to another), will the route planning software arrange pick-ups and drop-offs in order with the vehicle capacity, customer requirements and driver efficiency in mind?

  

• Best Day Selection

  Does the delivery planning software select the best day, route and sequence of deliveries within the schedule, to create optimal route density while still considering customer, vehicle, and driver requirements? Or only calculate a batch with a fixed number of delivery slots for the next day? Descartes' solution can do either.

  

• Same Day Dispatch

  Can the delivery routing software cope with, and assign, new or emergency orders to routes that are already being executed and do so after considering what has already been completed of that route’s deliveries?

   

• Continuous Optimisation

  Descartes' route optimisation engine continues to run from the moment it receives the first order to the last, this drives maximum efficiency, reduces time for delivery routes to be calculated and enables you to extend the cut-off time for new orders.

  Continuous dynamic route optimisation can use all of these concepts and provides all the benefits listed above.

   

  INFOGRAPHIC: Continuous v. Batch optimisation

An optimal multiple stop delivery route planning software, such as Descartes', will leverage your customers’ business priorities and one or more of the concepts above to solve the simplest most complex delivery route scheduling problems.

• Drive efficiency
• Reduce costs
• Improves productivity
• Enhance the customer experience

Read more about Multiple Drop Route Planning

Delivery Density

Ensuring that each delivery route has adequate density of deliveries and optimising the route travelled is vitally important, but so is creating an even workload across your pool of drivers. These functions are carried out by Descartes' advanced route optimisation engine.

A company’s ability to continuously create reliable multiple drop delivery routes using fewer vehicles, miles and drivers makes them more flexible, able to cope with changes in demand and minimise costs.

Why use Descartes Delivery Route Planning Software?

It takes industry knowledge, innovation and understanding of a customer’s challenges combined with great technology to deliver results. Descartes has been providing multiple drop route planning optimisation solutions for over three decades. We have been innovating and refining our routing capabilities to address a myriad of routing problems in diverse industries and continue to invest in new and onnovative technologies such as machione learning.

Our experience and attention to innovation has enabled us to provide solutions that address territory and strategic planning problems, dynamic route planning, same-day routing, multi-drop route planning as well as point-of-sale/appointment scheduling and much, much more.

• Example - Daily Route & Load Planning

  As each new order is placed so the Descartes routing solution re-optimises the possible routes and vehicles in real-time, allocating resources in order to maximise operational efficiency. This continual optimisation, as orders are being taken, enables fleets to be fully utilised and only those delivery slots that are ideal for a delivery route and that can be fulfilled with current resources, are offered to maintain overall customer service objectives. Any over commitment is identified early so that additional resources can be hired or deliveries reallocated..

  Orders are visualised on a map within the software which considers the street level network and other parameters in order to build the delivery routes automatically. Dispatchers then still have full control to manage exceptions with easily draging and dropping stops either within route or between vehicles.

  Companies that have moved from 'manual route construction' to 'exception management' with Descartes' routing solution find that their route planning time can often be reduced to just a fraction of the time previously taken.

  Read how PPS saved 25hrs/week in planning time.

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