How to Choose the Best Delivery Route Planner

The best delivery route planner app is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re delivering pallets of lumber to busy job sites or installing washing machines in people’s homes, your idea of the perfect app is going to be very different from someone who’s trying to get a few stops routed for one truck.

That means that whichever boat you happen to be in, separating out the solutions that are right for your business can be a challenge. Delivery route planning is difficult enough as it is—you want to make sure you have the right capabilities to get the job done without fussing with technology that’s not designed for your use case. 

What’s Your Delivery Route Planning Use Case?

To figure out the best delivery route app for your business, you first need to ask yourself: “what’s my delivery routing use case?”

In other words, how does a piece of software need to support you in order to ensure that your delivery routes will work for your business? 

Here are a few different use cases that might apply to your business:

• Shortest distance: Simply put, you need something that tells you the quickest route from point a to point b. A free route planner app like Google Maps or Mapquest might even get the job done if you’re only thinking about a small number of vehicles.
• Optimal sequence: This is one level of complexity higher, but still potentially a fairly simple use case. If you’re a courier or doing parcel deliveries, you may just need to plug stops into a routing engine and see what the optimal sequence is. 
• Scheduled deliveries: This is where things start to get trickier. If you need to deliver to some customers in the morning and others at night, or you’ve promised two-hour time windows to some of your customers, your routing has to accommodate that. This requires highly accurate delivery ETAs across the board if you don’t want to risk showing up at the wrong time. You still want optimized sequences and routes, but you also need to be able to account for time windows.
• Skill level-based routing: If you have a range of different delivery and service types that you offer, you may want to reserve some of your skilled technicians for jobs that actually require them—this way, you can avoid paying premium rates for jobs that could be carried out by less skilled drivers. Here, your route planner needs to find a way to balance skill requirements for specific jobs and take cost into account at the same time. 
• Static and dynamic routes: If you’re a food distributor or a uniform and linen provider, you likely have a mix of recurring stops and new stops each week. Most businesses in this situation run static weekly routes and make adjustments as they go in order to slot in new orders. This has its downsides—for one thing, it can make it difficult to keep your cost-per-route down week to week. Most route optimization solutions can’t blend static and dynamic routing in a way that actually works for food distributors, but when you can find one that does the impact can be huge. 
• Variable service times: This is likely to go hand in hand with skill-based routing, since skilled jobs might also require more time on site. If this is your use case, your routing program should accommodate differences in time spent on site for different jobs and factor them into ETA calculations. 
• Reload/overnight routes: If you’re delivering in cities, you might be sending out smaller trucks that need to come back to the warehouse to reload in the middle of the day. On the flipside, you may be doing deliveries to more remote areas that require your drivers to stay overnight. Each of these use cases has its own requirements that have to be factored into routes. 

Some businesses will only have to grapple with the simplest of these use cases—others will have a host of different ones to deal with. The trick is to match the use case to the route routing software provider. 

5 Key Features of the Best Delivery Route Planner

The best delivery route app is the one that actually covers your use cases. So, we’ll lay all of these out with the caveat that not all of them will apply to all use cases. That being said, if you’re dealing with any of the more complex challenges that we outlined above, it’s more than likely that these features will be must-haves for whatever routing software you choose. 

AI-Powered Routing

The AI hype isn’t really dying down—which means that it’s easy to lose track of the very real, very practical applications that AI already has in delivery and logistics. Route optimization is a case in point. For several years now, the cutting edge routing solutions on the market have leveraged AI and machine learning to significantly increase the accuracy of their ETAs and the efficiency of their routes. If ETAs matter to your particular business, finding a delivery route planner app for delivery drivers that incorporate AI is a must. 

Scalable Architecture

The last thing you want during the holiday capacity crunch is for your routing engine to slow to a crawl. Unfortunately, there’s a real risk of that happening when your routing platform is built (and implemented!) to scale. In practice, the best way to avoid slowdown and other growing pains is to look for a SaaS solution with a track record of seamlessly handling huge order volumes. Even if you’re only routing 10 trucks today, next year you might be doing double that—which means that an on-premise solution would hamper your ability to handle orders. A legacy solution, even one that’s ostensibly cloud-based, could cause the same issues. 

User Friendliness

Just because your routing use case is incredibly complex doesn’t mean your delivery route planner has to be. If you’re constantly consulting binders of information in order to figure out how to get the routes to work for your drivers in reality—rather than just being nice and efficient in theory—then you’re inevitably going to be spending prohibitive amounts of time on your routing processes. The best delivery route planner will actually save you time. 

This includes situations where human planners are making adjustments to system-generated routes. You don’t want to be in a situation where your team can’t make small adjustments to routes without those routes completely falling apart and losing efficiency. 

How DispatchTrack Helps Delivery Route Planners

At DispatchTrack, our goal is to support a wide variety of route optimization use cases in a way that’s seamless, scalable, and user-friendly. 

Numerous clients of ours have achieved 50% decreases in time spent routing —> read their stories here.

If you’re interested in learning more about how our delivery route planner can save your business time and money—regardless of use case—reach out to one of our experts to learn more.