5 Ways to Optimize Routes More Quickly and Save Money Doing It

Creating optimal delivery routes has never been easier—which is lucky, because it’s also never been more crucial to success. Fuel costs and driver hours are consistently among the biggest expenses that come with last mile deliveries, and when you’re able to optimize your routes you can help to minimize both of those line items. Given the economic headwinds that many last mile delivery businesses have to grapple with, there’s not many who would turn down the opportunity to significantly reduce those costs.

With the introduction of relatively new technologies like cloud computing and even newer technologies like AI and machine learning, advanced route optimization capabilities are more widely available than ever before. The kinds of heavy software deployments that used to make sense for only the largest enterprises can now be managed much more easily and require much less heavy lifting on the part of the delivery organization. 

That means that companies that deal with the last mile can spend less time focused on their technology and more time focused on their core business areas—i.e. getting the right goods to the right place at the right time. When you throw the right route optimization software into the mix as well, you can start to save costs and speed up your routing process. 

1. Optimize Routes with AI

When you optimize routes by hand, a few additional factors can kill your efficiency. An experienced route planner can probably eyeball a series of stops and come up with an efficient route—but what if some of those stops have time window constraints? Add in specific driver skill requirements for some stops and you’re looking at a mess that’s hard to plan your way out of. 

Here, each new constraint you add increases the possible routing permutations exponentially. Legacy route optimization solutions help you grapple with this increasing complexity to an extent—but AI-powered routing is what you really need for overcoming this level of complexity. 

Now, we’re not talking about the kind of AI that gets covered on the news—like ChatGPT or Bard. The AI applications that are leveraged in last mile deliveries right now are tried and true technologies that can turn all of the complex parameters you can throw at them into efficient routes. 

By cutting out the complexity that can come with many routing use cases, AI-powered routing speeds up the routing process—and helps you save money with more efficient routes. 

2. Codify, Codify, Codify

One of the reasons that route optimization processes can take such a long time, especially for more complex transport networks or operations that require a mix of new and recurring stops, is that there’s often not many people on the team who can do it correctly. It’s not uncommon to find businesses where routes are planned based on knowledge that only lives inside the heads of one or two people. When somebody gets sick or needs to take a vacation, things can quickly grind to a halt. 

All that changes when you have the tools in place to let others within your organization plan your routes. Not only can this save significant time for executives who might be able to expend their efforts on more strategic tasks, it can also position you to scale more easily if you grow your fleet size or footprint. 

How do you make this a reality? By finding a way to codify the unwritten rules of the routing process. This means that within your route optimization solution you can specify how much service time to factor in for specific types of deliveries or services. Likewise, you can specify which drivers have which skills and which job types those correspond to. 

You can do the same with vehicle types, so the routing platform knows that certain jobs require, say, a boom truck, and shouldn’t get routed without them. This makes it easy to generate routes that actually work—without relying entirely on knowledge that’s just in one person’s head. At the same time, it makes your routes more consistent and more cost-effective. 

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3. Leverage SaaS Technology

Another way you can make the routing process more accessible to other users and free up time across your teams is to use SaaS technology. The alternative—on-premise routing software—locks you into a system where users can only generate routes if they’re in the right physical space. Simply put, it makes it harder to actually perform routing. 

In most cases, it’s slower as well, since on-premise technology can only offer you so much processing power. When peak season rolls around and you’re routing 50% more trucks than usual, you really can’t afford to have your systems slow to a crawl. 

Of course, accessibility isn’t the only thing that SaaS routing options provide—they also help you future-proof your route optimization and evolve your process over time. While you have total control over your on-prem deployments, they don’t often offer the consistent flow of updates and improvements that you get from cloud-based platforms. The result is that switching to cloud-based routing puts you in a position to stay ahead of the curve as your needs change.

4. Prioritize Ease-of-Use

When it’s time to optimize routes, the last thing you want is to find your routers sifting through binders full of arcane technical information in order to get the routing engine to do what they want it to. Unfortunately, this is an all too common occurrence with many heavier route optimization deployments. 

It’s easy to imagine how this happens—many businesses have routing needs that are quite complex and cover a host of different use cases. The tools you use need to be equally complex and offer you the options you need in order to cover your bases. 

But this tradeoff between depth of functionality and ease-of-use is a false dichotomy. Just because a system offers a wide range of routing possibilities doesn’t mean it can’t be user-friendly. And that user-friendliness can make a huge difference in terms of how long it takes to optimize routes—to say nothing of how cost-effective the routes themselves are. 

After all, when you can intuitively build the routes the way you want to—without fussing with a bunch of complicated parameters and dials—you’re more likely to roll out routes that are actually “good,” not just “good enough.” 

5. Choose the Right Route Optimization Solution Provider

If there’s one key takeaway from the best practices we’ve provided above for optimizing routes more quickly—and reducing route costs in the process—it’s this: the right technology is a crucial building block. Yes, there’s a lot more to route optimization than just your choice of software, but trying to create the right routes with the wrong tool is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole—the results are never going to be what you want.

That’s why it’s so crucial to choose the right software, and just as crucial to choose the right software provider. After all, you need more than just features and functionality—you need a true partnership that will continue to support you in your routing needs. Finding someone you can rely on for smooth implementation, ongoing support, and continuing improvements and updates over time is the key to speeding up your routing not just now but in the future. That’s how you set yourself up for ongoing success in your last mile deliveries.