Planning the most efficient routes manually will take many hours away from your productivity, and it’s hard enough when you have one delivery vehicle and a short list of deliveries. Add multiple drivers, complex routes, and time windows into the mix, and you’re in trouble. This is impossible to accurately calculate without an advanced route planning tool.
Some delivery teams try to use free route planning apps (or even Google Maps), but these often fall short because they have a limit on the amount of routes or stops you can plan — or a cap on the number of drivers you can include.
When delivery teams suffer from inefficiency, it’s usually due to two underlying issues:
In order to run an efficient delivery operation, you need to be able to optimize routes easily, and know that they’re really the fastest route available. And there are other things to consider when planning routes, such as priority stops, real-time changes, time constraints, and more.
In this post, we’ll look at the typical bottlenecks for efficient route planning, and how you can use an automated route planner like Circuit to save time and money for your business.
Circuit started as a route planning app for drivers, and as we learned more about what our business customers needed, we developed Circuit for Teams to help delivery teams do more. As part of this process, our users told us about a number of operational bottlenecks, including:
Whether you’re a courier or a delivery company — or you’re a small business like a restaurant, florist, bakery, or brewery — route planning and optimization can be a severe time drain. However, the problems often differ between these different types of companies. For example:
If there’s anything that will throw your route planning out of whack, it’s a last minute change to the game plan. Especially if you’ve figured it all out manually and printed out the itinerary. Last minute changes in route planning can occur for any number of reasons, including:
These, and other unexpected events, can disrupt route planning. Not only does this make your process inefficient, but can leave recipients without the parcels that they’re expecting. This harms customer satisfaction and adds stress to your support team who deal with the inquiries.
If you’re looking for an efficient route planner with route optimization, route customization, proof of delivery, real-time driver tracking, and recipient updates, try Circuit for Teams. Get started right now with our free 7-day trial.
Planning delivery routes is one challenge to overcome, but actually operating those routes efficiently is another thing entirely. Delivery teams often struggle in the following ways:
By learning about these bottlenecks, we were able to build on Circuit’s route planner app, developing a platform especially for the needs of delivery teams: Circuit for Teams. Beyond route optimization, it helps dispatchers and drivers operate routes more efficiently through built-in proof of delivery, recipient updates, accurate ETAs, and real-time driver tracking.
If you’re looking for simple route planning software, you can try the Circuit Route Planner. With this multi-stop route planner, you can optimize unlimited routes with up to 500 stops.
But bear in mind that if you need to plan optimal routes for multiple drivers, and if you need delivery management tools for efficient operations, Circuit for Teams is a better fit for you.
As a subscriber to Circuit for Teams, you get access to:
And this works closely together with our:
Note: Coming soon to our Premium plan, you’ll get access to multi-capacity vehicles, meaning you’ll be able to specify the capacity of each vehicle in your fleet. This allows you to do efficient fleet-level route optimization — because you can customize the volume of packages in larger delivery vehicles versus smaller trucks and cars.
In the end, an efficient route planner simply needs to create optimized routes with minimal manual effort, with each one actually being the shortest route (or fastest route). But the best route optimizers will also help you manage your deliveries more efficiently.
With Circuit for Teams, you can account for time constraints and priority stops, customize routes after they’ve been planned, and track the whole delivery process as it’s occurring. Drivers are able to follow the optimized route in their own preferred GPS app, and do everything they need to do in one mobile app. This cuts down on the time they spend on the road, and means deliveries are completed more efficiently throughout the day.
If you’re looking for an efficient route planner with route optimization, route customization, proof of delivery, real-time driver tracking, and recipient updates, try Circuit for Teams. Get started right now with our free 7-day trial.