Hybrid Route Planning | Descartes Routing UK
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Hybrid Route Planning

Hybrid Route planning enables you to reduce costs and improve service to your customers by combining fixed deliveries for your top customers with Dynamic deliveries for other customers. 

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Capabilities of Hybrid Route Planning

Route planner

Utilise previously optimised master routes

Descartes strategic route planning software can be used to create optimised master routes which are then used as the basis for hybrid routes.

Customer experience

Easy-to-operate

Planners can quickly and easily create routes that cater for both the demands of the business and customers thanks to a modern, user-friendly interface.

Route execution

Optimised routes are achieved quickly

Using AI automation, the routes are continuously being optimised in the background, so the plan is ready to go as soon as you are.

Continuous improvements

Planning is fully integrated with dispatch and vehicle tracking

Go from planning to execution and use information based on machine learning to enhance the precision of future route plans.

Benefits of Hybrid Route Planning

Group communication and chats 294 white lines

Retain existing customer loyalty

For your most important or lucrative clients you can commit to a regular delivery schedule while slotting in additional orders and deliveries for other ad-hoc customers.

route optimisation time

Create efficient routes

Dynamic route optimisation can be used to accommodate lower-priority customer orders in-between your best customer's deliveries to increase delivery density and reduce costs.

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Quickly and easily deal with additional orders

React quickly and save money on urgent orders, use dynamic optimisation to add additional orders to your regular routes with ease.

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Discuss the impact of Hybrid Route Planning on your business

What is Hybrid Route Planning? 

To maximise fleet productivity while providing a distinctive level of customer service, hybrid route planning combines elements of static and dynamic route planning to deliver the most effective route plan. 

The process allows some customers to be served using fixed delivery routes and others using dynamic delivery patterns. 

Static routes are typically utilised by distribution and service businesses as a way to organise their deliveries and perform best when the client base, order size and frequency is consistent. However, when there are frequent changes, static routes lose their effectiveness. Dynamic planning better addresses the variability, which will result in more efficient, flexible, and productive delivery routes. However, dynamic planning will alter customer time windows to maximise efficiency, and capacity and reduce route costs. Constantly shifting delivery times can become an issue for customer service, potentially resulting in a loss of business, since many customers, especially the largest ones, prefer regular delivery times.  

With hybrid route planning, the larger or more profitable customers can be serviced on a fixed static delivery schedule basis. In contrast, smaller, more ad-hoc orders or less profitable customers can be served dynamically on the same route, based on their location and order quantity. Hybrid route planning efficiently threads the secondary customers between the fixed-window high-value customers. To increase delivery productivity even further, the route optimisation software will also take into account the size of customers' orders checking whether additional orders, for other customers, can be added to the route.