5 Key Benefits of Calendar Based Routing and Scheduling

Last week, DispatchTrack announced calendar-based routing and scheduling capabilities aimed at building suppliers and other industries that leverage calendars as a tool for scheduling. This new view of the routing engine enables users to drag and drop stops within the calendar and immediately visualize the resulting route updates on the map, in addition to giving users a quick and easy way to visualize existing appointments and visibilities at a quick glance.

That’s the what, but what about the why? How does calendar-based scheduling improve the lives of our users and help our customers achieve their goals?

Here are the top five ways:

1. Easier Change Management

It’s easy to overlook the importance of change management. Most people will do things the way they’ve always done them unless they’re forced to change, so when you implement a new piece of technology you tend to expect pushback. Drivers might not want to use a new mobile application, but you’re sure they can get used to it and they’ll see the benefits in the long run—the key is just to train people properly and stick with the program. 

That’s all undoubtedly true. But there’s something to be said for not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes there’s a reason that something has always been done a particular way, and it’s worthwhile to factor that in when you’re thinking about the transition to a new technology solution. 

For instance, when it comes to using a calendar to create schedules for delivery and service orders, there are obvious drawbacks: manual route planning is never going to be as efficient as route optimization software, and the process can be slow and laborious. But there’s also a reason that this is how schedulers have typically done the job. 

By meeting the team halfway and offering a routing interface that’s more similar to what they’re used to, you can get them onboard more quickly and start seeing dividends from your new software solution right away. 

2. Improved Visibility

Like we said above, there are reasons that people like to use a calendar view for planning out routes and schedules. One of them is improved visibility into existing timetables. A route manifest with ETAs and customer time window requests on it is all well and good, but it doesn’t exactly make it easy to see where there are gaps in your schedule at a quick glance. 

When you can easily flip to a calendar-based view of your routes and schedules, you can get high level visibility into your existing plans that much more quickly. Rather than having to dig into fine-grained details on a list of stops, you can instantly visualize what’s already on the proverbial—and literal—calendar. This increase in visibility into your existing plans can make it easier to field customer requests and spot potential inefficiencies. 

3. Faster Scheduling Processes

When it comes to route planning, speed is the name of the game—especially in industries like building supplies where last minute orders are often the norm. The faster you can create an efficient route plan, the more quickly and easily you can delight your customers without causing chaos in the process.

Faster routing and scheduling enables later order cutoffs, so you can accommodate more customer requests without disruption, and it enables you to save time that could be better put to use on more strategic tasks (just like our customer, xx, was able to do — read their story here). 

Modern route optimization engines can go a long way towards speeding up the routing process by cutting out incredibly fiddly manual plotting and calculating. With calendar-based routing, you can speed that process up even further by making it easier for planners to visualize what they’re doing. Any time you can make the UX more seamless or intuitive for users, you can speed up critical processes like routing. 

4. Greater Route Efficiency

When you have the right tools for the job, route optimization isn’t just quicker—it’s more effective as well. By combining the advantages of AI-powered route optimization via a sophisticated routing engine with the advantages of a calendar-based interface, you can boost your route efficiency even further. 

This is a big deal for a couple of (pretty obvious) reasons:

• Increased route efficiency means lower costs: when you can complete more stops per route, your fuel and labor costs per stop go down.
• Improved customer satisfaction: By improving the efficiency of your routes, you can complete more stops per day, which means you can fulfill more customer orders. That means shorter lead times for customers and fewer capacity crunches and late deliveries. 

Taken together, these efficiency improvements can help you save money and improve your customer retention rates. To call it a win-win situation would be an understatement. 

5. Seamless Integration of Routing and Scheduling

So far in this article, we’ve been using the terms routing and scheduling more or less interchangeably. That’s because, at the end of the day, the output of both processes is the same: a delivery manifest for your drivers and technicians for the day, including all the stops they need to hit and the times at which they should hit them. 

You can’t route with scheduling, and you can’t really create a schedule without at least an implied delivery route. Or, put more simply, these processes can really be treated as one and the same. And calendar-based routing helps you treat them that way. 

With a calendar view of the routing process, routing and scheduling are suddenly streamlined into one process—they’re even streamlined onto one screen. Ultimately, this reduces confusion and rework, it helps planners to get the optimal plan more quickly, and helps ensure that the routes that are being generated by the system actually work for your drivers and your customers. 

This is valuable on its own, but it’s even more valuable when you consider the ways in which streamlined and integrated processes can pave the way for smoother operations down the road. Once your team is leveraging smarter route optimization processes to speed up routing and scheduling and improve last mile logistics performance, you can suddenly start to uncover new potential efficiencies. With a highly-connected process, you can offer increased visibility to other stakeholders within the company and collaborate more effectively across teams and functions. 

With this kind of technology powering your logistics workflows, your last mile will be less of a headache and more of a well-oiled machine. When you don’t have to worry about cramming orders onto trucks and second-guessing whether your drivers can realistically meet their ETAs, you can focus more on customer experience and developing strong relationships. No matter how much technology changes the game, focusing on the customer will be always be a strong pathway to success—even when it comes to something like routing and scheduling.