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.
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.