The Internet has made products and services highly accessible to the general public, increasing demand exponentially. To meet rising demands, businesses have to produce and transport products to the best of their capabilities.
So, do your units have the capacity to fulfill the increased market demand but are still struggling to fulfill market demand? There’s likely an issue with your supply chain, and there’s an effective way to fix that. Route planning!
As a business owner with a significant fleet, you should know what route planning is and how it works; and that is what you will learn from this article!
What is Route Planning?
Route planning is suggesting a route leading your vehicle from the start to the end point while covering the required midpoints. It is using geospatial information to map the directions your driver should follow to conduct their task(s).
People often incorrectly use route planning and route optimization interchangeably. While their amalgamation gets businesses the best out of your trip management software, route planning itself is a standalone feature.
Route planning helps businesses reap maximum value from the start to the end point while fulfilling an ETA. Unlike route optimization, route planning does not account for practical issues such as fuel consumption.
Information Needed for Route Planning
Manual route planning or your trip management software will need the following information:
Locations: While using software, you will need specific geocoded locations of the start, end, and middle points that your vehicle needs to visit.
Capacity: If you have multiple vehicles running, you should mark all midpoints and divide them according to the running and loading capacity each vehicle has.
Time Windows: Route planning involves catering to strict ETAs. Therefore, knowing how many stops a vehicle is going to take and how much time they’ll spend on each stop is crucial.
Driving Time: You need to take care of your drivers and regulate the hours they drive for on a daily basis. Route planning keeps in account the maximum running time a vehicle should have in a day.
Route Planning and Route Optimization for Better Trip Management
Route optimization kills the smarter bird by reducing fleet running expenses. However, route planning kills the greater bird by giving fleet management some direction and freeing managers’ precious time and efforts.
Therefore, route planning is the first step for you to get an idea of how your trip management software works. However, you will quickly learn that route optimization is the next step to greater fleet efficiency.
Comments
Post a Comment