The Dispatcher's Guide to Faster Route Management in 2025

Let’s picture a hypothetical scenario: it’s 6 o’clock on a Thursday and somebody walks into your showroom. They’re desperate for a new couch, and they demand to have it delivered tomorrow. The next day’s routes have been finalized already, so you have a dilemma. You can try and shoehorn this order onto a truck route that’s already set—potentially risking late deliveries to other customers on the route and potential knock-on effects—or you can disappoint this customer and lose out on a sale.

There’s no great answer. If you upend your existing routes, it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen—you might be able to slot this order in easily, you might not. If you say that you can’t get it delivered the next day, you have a pretty clear idea of what’s going to happen—the customer is going to try and find someone else to fulfill the order—and it’s certainly not what you want.

If only your routing cutoff were later in the day, this whole dilemma would be moot. 

As it happens, that’s what modern route management systems can offer you. With the advent of SaaS technology, AI, and machine learning, route optimization technology has only gotten faster and more sophisticated. Delivery businesses that adopt this technology can now put themselves in a position to speed up routing, reduce costs, and get more out of their delivery capacity. 

The question is: how do they do it?

The Top Challenges in Route Management

In the hypothetical above, we actually hit on a few of the different challenges that make route management so thorny:

• Routing is time-consuming, which means that order cutoffs often have to be earlier than your sales team would prefer. 
• ETAs are hard to estimate—especially when you introduce on-site service or even simply different delivery types—so the impacts of any route changes can be difficult to pin down. 
• Most route optimization solutions aren’t designed to make manual intervention easier, so machine-generated routes often fall apart when human planners start to tweak them.
• Customers don’t really care about any of this—they just want what they want when they want it. 

This last point shines a light on the fundamental tension between customer experience and efficiency. If it didn’t matter when your customers got their orders, you could route deliveries the same way that parcel delivery companies do, with the shortest possible routes and as many orders as you can fit on the truck. 

But customers often have specific scheduling requests that you have to work around. Even if they don’t, you still need to find a way to give them an accurate ETA. 

Getting the day right doesn’t feel like too much to ask—and AM vs. PM is usually doable even without a sophisticated route management solution—but narrowing delivery times down a two-hour window? That’s incredibly difficult to accomplish by hand. 

This has implications not just for cost, but for capacity utilization as well. If you’re not sure how long a route is going to take, you don’t know if it’s overloaded or underutilized. And this is before we even start thinking about optimizing delivery costs. 

5 Ways to Speed Up Your Route Optimization

When you can speed up your optimization, route management gets radically simpler. You have more time to accept orders, and you have more time in which to make adjustments when orders come in late or other changes arise. 

Here are five key ways of making that happen:

• Ditch the pen and paper: First things first, if you’re routing with pen and paper—don’t. Human route planners are great at a lot of things, and they bring important domain knowledge to the process, but they simply can’t route as quickly, efficiently, or accurately without the help of the right solution. If you’re still using pen and paper for routing, the absolutely easiest way to speed up the process is to find route management software to help. 
• Switch to the cloud: On-premise routing software deployments are limited in how much computing power they can use. Routing is already computationally expensive, so without the ability to draw on extra computing power as needed, even the most sophisticated routing algorithm will slow to a crawl. With SaaS-based software, you don’t have this problem. In fact, the right software will enable you to generate routes for thousands of stops in a matter of seconds. 
• Leverage AI and machine learning: We know, they’re buzzwords. But they’re also powerful technologies with tried and true applications in logistics and delivery management. Given all of the data that needs to get analyzed to create an efficient route with an accurate ETA, route optimization is one of ideal use cases for machine learning. Over time, AI-powered routing will learn about traffic patterns, weather delays, and service time differences until it can predict ETAs with 98% accuracy. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of the process, enabling you to more effectively streamline it.
• Codify your routing knowledge: One of the things that can slow down the route optimization process is when the same manual adjustments to system-generated routes have to be made over and over again. Luckily, the right software can enable you to codify the knowledge that your route planners have into the system, so that the algorithm can account for it at the routing stage. This can include all sorts of information: differences in driver speed, difference in skill level required for certain jobs, differences in the amount of time spent on site for specific jobs, etc.
• Integrate route management with driver management and customer experience: It’s all well and good optimizing your routes more quickly, but to really get value out of that added speed you need to have a close connection between planning and execution. That means ensuring that drivers are automatically dispatched their routes once the route optimization process is finished, and that they’re automatically notified for any route updates. Likewise, it means keeping customers in the loop with accurate ETAs at every stage of the delivery process. This way, you can turn faster routing into improved performance and customer satisfaction. 

Key Benefits of a Smart Route Management System

Okay, let’s say you’ve achieved faster route management by following the best practices above. What benefits can you actually expect to experience? In other words, how will these improvements save you time and money when it comes to last mile delivery management?

Here are a few concrete ways that the best route optimization software can benefit businesses that handle last mile deliveries. 

• Reduced manual time spent routing. DispatchTrack customers have consistently reduced their routing time by 50% or more — read about their stories here.
• Later order cutoff times—meaning that you can capture more orders before they decide to take their business elsewhere. 
• Easier rerouting—if you need to start a route from scratch, you can do that quickly and easily without the entire thing coming crashing down on your head. The result is that you have more flexibility across the board, which you can translate into efficiency improvements in other areas of the last mile. 

At the end of the day, each of these benefits adds up to one thing: lower costs. And how do you achieve all of that? It starts with leveraging the right route management system for your business.