If you are still planning your regular routes conventionally, you already know how unreliable that method can be. Often, no matter how familiar you are with the road, there is no guarantee that it won’t cause delayed deliveries. This happens when:
- your service vehicles get stuck in traffic during rush hour, or
- your drivers didn’t anticipate the bad weather conditions they might face.
Regardless of the reasons, your customers will not care. And making excuses won’t even help. As a result, your customers will end up making transactions with your competitors.
Why You Need Route Planning Software for Your Business
These are just a few of the many issues you might face if you do not have the right route planning software. There’s more you need to worry about, but the bottom line here is that your business will suffer.
Furthermore, inaccurate routes come with various effects too. It can lead to driver attrition and fuel expenses, not to mention legal hassles. You’d be surprised to know that many road accidents could have been prevented only if the driver had taken a more precise route. In this case, it’s a safe decision to have personal injury or truck accident lawyers on your speed dial. This might cost your company thousands of dollars, but you’ll protect your company in the long run.
You have to understand that there is no better way to plan a route than with software. Manual planning may work, but its limitations include:
- no detailed map on the spreadsheet,
- not being able to determine where your drivers should make a left or U-turn,
- not knowing which areas are under construction, and
- if you are not familiar with the site, you will not know roads closures.
You can prevent all of these issues if you have a route planner. According to reports, this software can help you plan less than a minute and decrease your logistics costs by 50 percent! As a businessman, you know that’s a considerable amount of money you can use for other essential expenses.
Most delivery businesses and logistics have probably heard bout the benefits of route planning systems. However, many of them are still having doubts.
Does their organization benefit from route planning software, or is this just another sales pitch? Do software programmers want to sell the product to gain profit? Or do they want to transform your business to help you expand and grow?
The answer is simple. If a product can significantly innovate your organization, it’s worth investing in. Route planning systems can revolutionize your processes and transform your business in ways you can only imagine. That said, let’s talk bout its several advantages.
Plan a Route in a Minute
No matter how familiar you are with the area, route planning and fleet management with pen and paper can take a significant amount of time. Route optimization software can do the task in less than a minute. Such software can calculate the exact route within a few seconds, providing you with an optimized route with correct directions to help delivery drivers.
In other terms, you get to save a lot of working hours that you can invest in other tasks in your business. You don’t need to waste so much time planning and administering routes as the software does the job efficiently.
Avoid Challenging Turns
It’s normal for drivers to face tricky turns each day. At some point, these turns include U-turns, right-turns, and left turns, and as you may know, each turn could be challenging, particularly for trucking services.
For instance, 60 percent of road crashes take place in left-turn intersections. In addition, these turns can result in wasted time as drivers need to wait for the incoming traffic to give way or clear out. This then results in more fuel usage and increased expenses.
Keep Drivers Safe from Hazardous Weather Conditions
Reports suggest that about 22 percent of yearly vehicle accidents are associated with bad weather. Also, road accidents are more prevalent when it’s raining, increasing the numbers by 203 percent.
This means that drivers are more at risk of accidents during bad weather conditions. And one accident can result in additional company expenses, including legal, repair, and medical issues.
The route planning software can look at the geographic region of the destination according to the route date. From there, it anticipates the weather conditions of the area. Depending on the system’s calculations, it will ask the driver to reduce speed or adjust the travel time.
Guarantees Correct Drop-offs
Dropping off a parcel or package for a small establishment is easy. But it can be challenging to do so in large institutions, like malls or hospitals. For instance, hospitals typically have numerous entrances, so how will you know where to enter to drop off a package? This is one of those instances where drivers will waste so much time looking for the right door for deliveries.
The route planning program can help you make things easier. You need to mark the correct delivery entrance when you first visit the location. It will then use that same entrance the next time you visit the establishment.
The benefits mentioned above are the fundamental ones of route planning software. The program can have various advantages, including planning your day, tracking your vehicles, and no manual loading.
If you plan to integrate route planning systems into your business, these are the benefits you will reap. The software might come with a significant fee. Still, there is no doubt that it will revolutionize your business and innovate it with the help of technology.