Delivery Route Planning: What It Is and How to Do It Right

If you’re a fan of any fantasy or superhero franchise like Harry Potter, The Lord of The Rings or Marvel, you’ll notice a common arc: Heroes have to reach some place to complete an important quest, but the path is ridden by insurmountable obstacles, which they often bypass through alternate, even secret paths. 

Likewise, given that drivers making last-mile deliveries face many obstacles on the road, it is necessary to help them avoid these with effective route planning. This blog discusses setting up efficient delivery routes (secret routes) for your drivers. Let’s start the ride! 

What is a delivery route?

A delivery route is the specific path taken by a delivery vehicle to transport goods to multiple destinations, such as homes, businesses, or collection points. The goal of designing a delivery route is to maximize efficiency, minimize travel time, and reduce overall logistics costs. This involves carefully considering various factors, such as the distance between stops, vehicle capacity, traffic conditions, customer time preferences, and even weather forecasts.

Effective route planning is a complex task that requires real-time data and dynamic adjustments to ensure optimal performance. Solutions like Locus’ delivery route planning platform automate this process, allowing businesses to streamline logistics, save on fuel costs, reduce delivery time, and enhance the overall customer experience. By using advanced algorithms, Locus can create intelligent routes that take all variables into account, ensuring timely and cost-efficient deliveries that improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

What is delivery route planning? 

Delivery route planning is the process of planning, sequencing, and scheduling optimal routes so that drivers deliver the maximum number of orders in the shortest time. It helps delivery managers to plan cost-effective and economical routes for riders that minimizes distance and time taken for delivery. 

Delivery route planning creates physical paths between pickup and drop-off points through multiple locations. The pickup points are warehouses, fulfillment centers, hubs, depots, or facilities. The drop-off points are customer destinations where products are delivered.

Why is delivery route planning crucial for your drivers?

• Do your drivers regularly fail to follow the planned routes?
• Do your drivers regularly fail to deliver orders on time?
• Are your customer addresses unclear for drivers?

If the answer is yes to all these questions, your route planning needs a serious rework. Increasing your profit from last-mile deliveries and cutting unnecessary costs is crucial. But that cannot happen when your drivers are unhappy with delivery workflows. Read on to find out why delivery route planning is vital for driver satisfaction. 

Increase safety 

Unfamiliar roads, road closures, or traffic make riding more stressful for drivers. Effective route planning ensures you prepare and take in account risks and constraints on the road and maximize your fleet’s productivity. Planning delivery routes that avoid heavy traffic and bad roads help drivers avoid the anxiety of missing deliveries because of obstacles. 

Improve work-life balance 

We often forget that drivers are not their job.  Like everyone else, they too would like to spend time on their interests outside of work and also with their loved ones. With efficient delivery routes, you can empower drivers to complete more deliveries in a shift so that they spend relatively less time on the road. 

Boost your driver productivity 

Some drivers may have difficulties in managing their time. They may not follow the route plans to drive more empty miles, or take unnecessary breaks that would lead to delayed deliveries and incur added costs for businesses. An efficient route plan helps you optimize driver shifts and minimize backtracking, thereby improving driver productivity. 

What are the Challenges in Delivery Route Planning?

Effective delivery route planning involves navigating several challenges to ensure timely, cost-efficient, and customer-centric operations. One of the primary hurdles is route optimization. The goal is to minimize travel distances, reduce operational costs, and improve delivery efficiency. Achieving this requires considering variables such as driver availability, vehicle capacities, customer preferences, and delivery constraints. Advanced planning solutions can generate the most efficient routes, saving time and resources while meeting delivery requirements.

Another significant challenge is managing time constraints. Balancing promised delivery deadlines with driver work schedules can often be complex. Delivery windows, peak traffic times, and specific customer deadlines must all be accounted for. A reliable planning tool helps businesses handle these constraints by intelligently factoring in real-time data like traffic patterns and customer availability, ensuring timely deliveries without compromising efficiency.

Real-time tracking also plays a crucial role in addressing planning challenges. Being able to track vehicles, monitor progress, and quickly respond to any issues or delays is essential for successful route execution. Using advanced tracking technologies and geolocation tools, businesses can gain enhanced visibility, quickly adapt to disruptions, and keep customers informed of any changes to their delivery timelines.

Lastly, managing contingencies is an unavoidable part of route planning. Unexpected events such as traffic congestion, weather conditions, or vehicle breakdowns can throw off the schedule. A robust planning solution enables businesses to respond swiftly, reassign tasks, and optimize resources in real-time, ensuring that disruptions are minimized and customer satisfaction remains high.

What are the key steps to plan delivery routes?

Planning efficient delivery routes is a critical process that helps ensure timely deliveries while minimizing operational costs. Below are the key steps to effectively plan delivery routes:

1. Collect and Organize Data
   Gather all relevant data, including delivery addresses, item quantities, customer preferences (like preferred delivery times), and any delivery constraints. Organize this information to form a clear foundation for the planning process.
   
2. Analyze Data for Grouping Opportunities
   Review the collected data to identify opportunities for grouping deliveries that are geographically close. This reduces travel time, optimizes fleet utilization, and ultimately saves costs.
   
3. Optimize Routes
   Use route planning software or tools to calculate the most efficient routes. Consider factors such as time constraints, road conditions, traffic patterns, customer delivery windows, and delivery priorities. The goal is to minimize both fuel costs and delivery time while meeting customer expectations.
   
4. Allocate Resources
   Assign the appropriate resources, such as delivery vehicles and drivers, based on the workload for each route. Ensuring that resources are allocated effectively helps avoid overloading or underutilization of drivers and vehicles.
   
5. Communicate with Drivers
   Ensure clear communication with your drivers by providing them with detailed route information. This includes delivery addresses, schedules, special instructions, and any last-minute changes. Clear communication helps reduce errors and ensures smooth execution of the planned routes.
   
6. Monitor Deliveries in Real-Time
   Use real-time tracking tools to monitor delivery progress and ensure that deliveries are on track. This allows you to manage delays, make adjustments if necessary, and provide updates to customers.
   
7. Evaluate and Adjust
   After the delivery process, evaluate performance by analyzing data such as delivery times, fuel consumption, customer satisfaction, and any issues that arose. Use these insights to refine your route planning process for continuous improvement.

Benefits of a Dedicated Delivery Route Planning Tool

A dedicated delivery route planning tool offers numerous advantages that streamline the entire delivery process, from planning to execution. Below are the key benefits of using such a tool:

1. Significant Time Savings
   Automating the delivery route planning process with a dedicated tool saves valuable time. By eliminating manual planning tasks, businesses can focus on more strategic aspects of logistics, ultimately speeding up the entire process.
   
2. Optimized Resource Utilization
   A dedicated tool helps optimize the use of resources by factoring in variables like vehicle capacity, driver availability, and time constraints. This ensures that each vehicle is fully utilized, improving operational efficiency and reducing unnecessary costs.
   
3. Cost Reduction
   By optimizing routes, a dedicated planning tool minimizes travel distances and eliminates duplications or delays, which directly translates to reduced logistics costs. Savings are realized through lower fuel expenses, fewer overtime hours, and avoiding penalties for late deliveries.
   
4. On-Time Deliveries and Improved Customer Satisfaction
   Effective route planning results in on-time deliveries and better management of delivery appointments. A dedicated tool ensures that deliveries are punctual, errors are minimized, and customers receive a more reliable service, leading to increased trust and loyalty.
   
5. Real-Time Tracking and Monitoring
   Many dedicated tools offer real-time tracking features that allow businesses to monitor deliveries as they happen. With real-time updates on vehicle locations and delivery statuses, companies can address issues immediately and adjust plans as necessary, improving visibility and operational responsiveness.

Key Factors to Consider While Selecting a Delivery Route Planning Solution

When selecting the best delivery route planner, it’s essential to choose a solution that aligns with your company’s specific needs and goals. Below are key factors to consider in order to make an informed decision:

1. Understand Your Company’s Needs
   Before diving into software options, clearly define your company’s requirements. What are the unique challenges and constraints your logistics operation faces? Identify the essential features needed, such as real-time tracking, route optimization, or driver management. Understanding these factors will help you target the software solutions best suited to your needs.
   
2. Complexity Handling and Advanced Algorithms
   Delivery routes vary in complexity based on the number of deliveries, time constraints, and available resources. Choose software that can effectively manage this complexity. The software should be equipped with advanced algorithms that can optimize delivery routes in real-time, considering multiple variables like traffic, road conditions, and delivery priorities.
   
3. User-Friendly Interface
   A good route planning solution should be intuitive and easy to use. A user-friendly interface allows your team to efficiently plan deliveries without unnecessary delays or errors. The more straightforward the system, the more likely it is that your team will be able to optimize routes quickly and minimize mistakes.
   
4. Integration with Existing Systems
   Seamless integration with other business systems, such as inventory management, CRM, or delivery tracking platforms, is crucial. Ensure the delivery route planning software can synchronize with your current tools to streamline the entire logistics process. This integration reduces manual data entry and enhances efficiency across all departments.
   
5. Scalability and Flexibility
   As your business grows and the logistics landscape evolves, your delivery needs will change. Choose a delivery route planning solution that is flexible and scalable, capable of adapting to future demands and expansions. A scalable solution will prevent you from needing to switch systems frequently as your business evolves, saving time and resources in the long run.

How do you plan efficient delivery routes for your drivers?

You can summarize a fleet driver’s needs in three words; safe, simple, and efficient deliveries. But how do you plan such efficient delivery routes that make your drivers’ work lives easier? It’s time to find out the answer.

Use geocoding 

One of the drivers’ costliest delivery mistakes is ending up at the wrong delivery address. Given the pressure to make on-time deliveries, your drivers cannot do the guesswork of spotting the right customer location for every delivery. 

You can avoid this time-consuming and costly mistake with the help of geocoding: Essentially, it converts those inaccurate addresses into precise geographical coordinates that help your drivers make deliveries on time. 

Realistic Loading times and Expected Time of Arrival (ETA)

When route planning is efficient in theory but unrealistic to execute on ground, it increases drivers’ workloads. One reason for this mismatch is when routes do not account for actual loading times and Expected Time of Arrival (ETA). An unrealistic ETA target that does not factor in real loading and unloading time pressurizes your drivers to make deliveries according to steep, often unattainable timelines. 

With its data history, a delivery route planner helps you accurately calculate and plan service time for each stop. While planning ETAs, it factors in parameters like time windows, pickup time, delivery location, proximity, type of goods, vehicle capacity, loading time, travel time between stops, and unloading time. Its multi-stop route planning ensures drivers have enough time between each stop and minimizes the pressure of running behind the delivery schedule. 

Get your performance targets and incentives right 

The two biggest mistakes while using a delivery management system are setting unrealistic targets for drivers and not rewarding them with incentives. These two aspects are directly linked to driver satisfaction. When you put unrealistic performance expectations, your turnover rate increases resulting in constantly losing your highly-experienced and skilled drivers. 

With its historical data and advanced tracking capabilities, route planning software helps you gather driver performance information. It provides granular insights on which driver performed well and consumed more fuel. It enables you to reward incentives to your drivers based on some crucial parameters like On-Time In-Full (OTIF), First Attempted Delivery Rates (FADR), and so on. 

Enable real-time communication 

To achieve the maximum number of on-time deliveries, you should enable seamless communication between delivery managers, drivers, and customers. 

As drivers are busy on the road, it is unsafe for them to update their delivery status or share their current location with dispatchers. Control Tower solutions lets you track your drivers in real-time. In case of any canceled deliveries, the route optimization software automatically updates them in seconds. Also, it automatically notifies your customers when drivers are nearby. Its end-to-end communication ensures customers are better prepared before the driver arrives.

Conclusion 

Dynamic route optimization is revolutionizing the logistics industry by enhancing operational efficiency, reducing costs, and improving customer satisfaction. Locus leads the way with its powerful, AI-driven dynamic route optimization solutions, trusted globally across various industries. With over 1.5 billion deliveries optimized, Locus has consistently achieved a 99.5% SLA adherence rate and saved companies more than $300 million in logistics costs while reducing carbon emissions.

Locus offers a comprehensive, integrated platform that goes beyond simple route planning. Key features such as real-time route adjustments, dynamic territory optimization, and comprehensive driver support ensure that every stage of the delivery process from planning to execution is optimized for maximum efficiency.

With real-time route adjustments, Locus instantly recalculates routes to accommodate immediate operational changes, minimizing delays and ensuring that deliveries stay on track. Dynamic territory optimization automatically balances workloads, ensuring that delivery routes are designed to reduce inefficiencies and prevent overloads. Locus’ Driver Companion App provides drivers with real-time guidance and alerts to ensure smooth route adherence and compliance, empowering them to handle unexpected situations like reattempted deliveries, cancellations, and returns.

By choosing Locus, businesses can optimize their delivery operations while enhancing driver satisfaction. The system’s ability to plan efficient, optimized routes enables drivers to complete more deliveries, reduce road time, and maintain a healthier work-life balance while also boosting on-time performance. 

Ready to enhance your logistics? Book a demo with Locus today and experience how dynamic route optimization can streamline your operations, improve customer satisfaction, and support your drivers.