5 Signs You Need to Upgrade Your Route Strategy Planner

When it comes to last mile delivery management, there’s always a risk of stagnation. Planning and executing delivery routes is a complex problem—one that has serious implications for processes further up- and down-stream in the fulfillment stream. When you’ve got a process that’s working for you, it may feel like it would be risky to mess with it.

There’s huge value to stability, especially in industries where returning and recurring customers are the backbone of your business. But there is a tradeoff: if you’re not able to adapt to new market conditions, new customer expectations, and new and evolving technology, you may be putting yourself in a difficult position as you try to grow and evolve your business. 

One of the most common reasons for slow, inflexible, and outdated delivery and logistics processes comes down to strategic route planning. If your routes can’t evolve, the rest of your delivery operations can get bogged down around them. That’s why it’s so crucial to take stock of whether your delivery route planning technology is still getting the job done. 

In this post, we’ll go over the telltale signs that your route strategy planner is holding back your last mile delivery and logistics operations. If your current technology ticks any of these boxes, it might be time to think about upgrading to a more modern solution. 

1. It Takes Days to Generate a Route with Your Current Strategy Planner

There’s no arguing with the fact that route planning is complicated—especially if you’re doing a mix of new and recurring orders each week. Manually generating static route plans involves accounting for customer time window requests, driver skill and capacity, customer-driver affinity, and much more—and that’s before you even start to think about efficiency or route costs. 

And once you’ve generated these static route plans, there’s no guarantee that they’re even going to work for you. Purely dynamic route plans don’t provide you with reliability or repeatability, but static route plans don’t provide you with any flexibility. If you don’t have the ability to generate new routes quickly and then update them as needed, you’re going to have trouble meeting your customers’ needs consistently. 

Unfortunately, there are legacy strategic route planners out there that aren’t much quicker than routing by hand. They’re so complicated and byzantine that route planners need months of training and binders full of instructions to even get started. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. If it takes forever to build new strategic route plans with your current solution, it’s time to look into a new one that’s faster and easier to use.

2. Making Daily Route Adjustments Is Difficult and Complex

The potential pitfall we saw above was a scenario where building out a weekly strategic route planning is complex and time-consuming. But you can also run into issues when translating weekly route plans into daily routes that drivers can actually execute becomes just as challenging. 

Again, this is a process that’s too complicated to do efficiently by hand—that’s why you have a route strategy planner in the first place. But many legacy solutions put users in a position where they have to export weekly route plans into a completely different solution in order to try and turn them into workable daily delivery routes. 

The good news is that there is an alternative. Modern route planning and optimization software can connect these two processes so that weekly plans are automatically synced with daily routes. Not only can you then generate route strategy plans in record time, you can also cross the final hurdle to turn those weekly plans into daily routes that work for your customers and their delivery preferences. 

3. Your Drivers Can’t Meet Their ETAs

Sometimes, from behind the scenes, it seems like everything is going smoothly. You’ve got a set of weekly route plans that fit your parameters, and you have a repeatable process for generating daily route plans and dispatching drivers. And then the calls start to come in: “Where’s my order? It was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

It’s tempting to blame the drivers when they consistently fail to deliver at the right time—but usually the problem actually lies with the routes that the drivers are being dispatched. Generating ETAs is tricky. It requires you to account for travel time, service time, traffic, and much more. But a modern solution should be able to handle it with the use of AI, machine learning, and configurable service times. If your route strategy planner can’t get ETAs right, it’s time to invest in something new. 

4. Route Planning and Execution Aren’t Integrated with Other Last Mile Processes

Route execution isn’t just about giving the driver a realistic route manifest with ETAs that they can actually hit—it’s also about ensuring a great customer experience from order in to signed, sealed, and delivered. 

This doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Yes, you need to show up at the time you promised, but you also need to make sure the customer knows that you’re showing up then. Crucially, the customer also needs to feel confident that you’re actually going to show up with the correct order at the correct time, and that they can reach out to your team if any issues arise. 

To achieve this, you need to make sure that your strategic route planning doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Instead, your strategy planner should be fully integrated and connected with the rest of your logistics and fleet management chain. If your current solution doesn’t include in-built functionality for last mile delivery tracking, customer experience, proof of delivery, and route execution or extremely close integrations with other solutions that can handle those areas, you’re setting yourself up for potential silos and disconnect. 

By contrast, the right solution will make total logistics connectivity and visibility second nature—resulting in happier customers and reduced delivery costs across the board.   

5. Your Route Strategy Planner Provider Doesn’t Take Your Calls

Obviously, no software solution is perfect. Bugs crop up, outages arise, and your needs may change in terms of both integration and functionality. When that happens, are you able to get timely, helpful support from your route strategy planner solution provider—or are you stuck holding the bag whenever anything goes wrong?

There’s an important note to be made here about the difference between cloud and on-premise deployments in this regard. With on-prem deployments, your technology provider should still be able to offer support, but you’re fundamentally in charge of your deployment. With cloud-based technology, it’s the opposite: the software company handles version control, new updates, bug fixes, and troubleshooting. Given how specialized some of the IT work required for this can be, cloud deployments are almost always the better bet for last mile logistics technology. 

Upgrading Your Route Strategy Planner

At the end of the day, the right software provider in any area will be the one that can actually support you—not just with a great solution, but with ongoing improvements and a spirit of partnership. If you’re not getting that from your current route strategy planner, it’s time to look at other options. Strategic route planning solutions that make route planning quick, easy, connected, and intelligent are out there—and your operation absolutely deserves one.