Route Optimization Guide: Boost Efficiency and Cut Costs

Transportation is at the heart of many businesses.

Managing last mile delivery, coordinating service calls, or overseeing multiple locations. These become more efficient with a reliable route planner to streamline your operations. Finding the optimal route for every trip can save time, reduce fuel expenses, and achieve the most efficient route possible. Even when handling multiple stops or multiple routes.

This guide will walk you through the importance of planning the best route for your needs. We’ll explore how tools like a route planner app or route optimization tools can simplify operations for mile delivery.

We’ll also touch on popular resources and how they can aid in reaching your destinations with ease.

If done effectively, optimizing your routes can transform your business. Helping you cut costs and boost productivity.

What Is Route Optimization, and Why Does It Matter?

Route optimization is the process of organizing a business’s driving plans for both improved efficiency and cost savings. It includes:

• Driver or technician scheduling
• Roadways used to go to appointments
• Stops for breaks and fuel
• Analysis of traffic factors

For example, on a map, it may look like going from your office to a client is fastest by taking a direct route. But maybe that route is constantly with bumper-to-bumper traffic. Or perhaps the speed limit is restricted because of schools and pedestrians.

It might be quicker to take a more roundabout route. In the end, the technician gets there faster and uses less gasoline. Not only that, your customers aren’t left waiting for an employee to arrive late because of delays en route.

Route optimization has been made much easier by today’s modern technology:

• The Global Positioning System (GPS) that pinpoints vehicle locations
• Mobile apps that report traffic and road construction in real time
• Dashboard maps that display routes and provide voice directions
• Dispatching software that can match technicians with appropriate routing

It’s no longer necessary for businesses to plan out routes on paper or for drivers to use old-fashioned maps. Instead, they can use the technology above to make adjustments on the fly.

This is helpful if, say, a customer emergency arises that calls for a schedule and route change. It’s also ideal when heavy traffic or construction requires taking a different path to a destination.

Benefits of Route Optimization for Businesses

Workers in many different types of industries use route optimization. These include:

• Home maintenance providers (HVAC, plumbers, etc.)
• Telecommunications and media technicians
• Pool and landscaping professionals
• Delivery-heavy companies (florists, couriers, etc.)
• Salespeople (pharma, office equipment, etc.)

Delivery route optimization means customers get their orders and law firms get their legal documents on time. For home services businesses, efficient routing brings many benefits:

• Improved customer satisfaction for better reviews
• Lower costs for fuel and vehicle wear
• Increased appointment volume for more revenue
• Reduced overtime or pay for time not with customers
• Less frustrated employees for greater retention

FROM ONE OF OUR PARTNERS: Using Route Optimization to Make Your Technicians Happy

How Route Optimization Improves Efficiency and Reduces Costs

Let’s take a closer look at how route optimization improves efficiency and costs for service providers. You may be surprised at how many areas of the business are affected by routing.

Managing Staff Assignments

If you have more than one or two employees, keeping track of their appointments and whereabouts gets complicated. If you’re doing old-fashioned route planning on paper or not planning routes at all, you may not know where staff is throughout the day.

No routing software? Your company may need to employ other staff simply to monitor the whereabouts and directions for employees. For enterprise-level businesses, this uses significant resources. It can be costly and have downstream effects, as you’ll read below.

Appointment Accuracy

Optimizing employee routing is one of the best ways you can keep an accurate appointment calendar. This is especially vital for busy home service providers.

For example, a customer may have taken the morning off work to wait for a technician to repair their air conditioning unit. If the technician arrives late because of traffic, the customer may have returned to work. They’re no doubt going to be angry that their AC was never fixed.

That leads to no time billed for that client, which is lost revenue. The client may cancel and turn to a competitor for more reliable service. And they may leave your business a bad online review, which discourages new customers from hiring you.

Appointment accuracy also impacts your volume of total billable hours. If you know you can get between appointments in a predictable way, you can schedule as many as possible on any given day. This increases profits and boosts your bottom line.

Flexibility for the Unexpected

Has your business experienced the following scenarios?

• Employees calling in sick or going home sick midday
• Vehicle breakdowns, like flat tires or engine trouble
• Staff running behind because of complicated jobs
• Weather-related emergencies (closed roads, increased customer demand)
• Technicians needing to pause work to get special tools or parts

The more sophisticated your route optimization is, the easier it becomes to be agile in these situations. With the best routing optimization, you can handle the unpredictable with the least damage possible.

For instance, in the hypothetical emergencies above, you could:

• Reroute a staff member to cover for one who is sick or whose car broke down
• Change the order of deliveries to prioritize the most important first
• Send drivers by surface roads when a highway is closed
• Pull technicians from on-call to fill in when others run behind

RELATED ARTICLE: How to Get More from Your Field Service Dispatch Management

Fleet Management

We discussed how route optimization saves on fuel. This makes sense if you think about eliminating unnecessary journeys or inefficient mapping.

Another aspect of route optimization that saves gas and diesel is avoiding stop-and-go traffic. According to the US Department of Energy, fuel economy is lowered by a whopping 10–40% in heavy traffic where drivers have to ride their brakes.

To supplement route optimization, you can use driver telematics data to identify driving behaviors that eat up fuel. United Parcel Service (UPS) does this, for example, because they have such an enormous fleet of delivery trucks.

It may sound trivial, but those fuel savings add up over time. The larger the company, the more you can reduce fuel costs—to the tune of thousands of dollars over a year.

Additionally, route optimization reduces avoidable wear and tear on company vehicles. From a fleet management perspective, this is desirable. It increases the lifespan of cars, vans, and trucks, and it reduces vehicle downtime for repairs. All this saves businesses money in the long term.

RELATED ARTICLE: Fleet Management 101: The Basics for Field Services Companies

Business Scalability

Optimizing driver routes for field services and deliveries makes it easy to scale your business. In most cases, this means growing larger.

In some instances, though, your business demand may expand and shrink regularly with the seasons. Do you service furnaces and air conditioners? Your busiest periods are likely the winter and summer, with spring and autumn requiring fewer truck rolls.

When you use route optimization, you can better manage these changes. This is especially important during high-demand periods to meet customer needs.

Key Factors to Consider When Optimizing Routes

So let’s say that optimizing routes for your enterprise-level home service business is your next step. Where do you start? What factors do you consider when planning routes?

Below are some key considerations to integrate in your optimization.

Job Priority and Time Sensitivity

For example, a family whose furnace has stopped working in sub-zero weather would be seen before a routine HVAC inspection. You might also get unplanned emergencies, like a broken air conditioner in a heat wave, that require priority scheduling. This is basic customer service triage.

Technician Skill Matching

Some jobs require more experience than others. Therefore, you need to put certain staff members on particular routes to ensure they cover those jobs. This not only affects customer satisfaction but also reduces time spent on jobs to increase your appointment volume.

Geographical Clustering

With a large business, you’re likely to have customers scattered over a vast area. It’s smart to break your territory into small sections. Keep technicians within those boundaries rather than covering the entire region. This strategy saves on fuel and increases the number of appointments you can schedule.

Tools and Equipment Needed

You may only have, say, three pipe imaging cameras for trenchless repairs done by your plumbing business. These will need to be allocated to the jobs that require them on any given day. Proper routing will ensure the equipment is there when you need it. It may also indicate shortages that require more capital purchases.

Traffic and Weather Data

This component will obviously change by the day and hour. That’s why it’s important to use the most innovative and comprehensive route optimization system available. You want software that can integrate these changeable factors into route planning and dispatch.

Top Tools and Software for Effective Route Optimization

Ready to start using effective route optimization for your enterprise business? Here are some tips you can use right away to see quick results:

1. There’s no “one size fits all” with this type of software. You need one that’s able to handle the demands of an enterprise-level business, not a mom-and-pop company.
2. Similarly, seek route optimization software that is used in your industry. It will have features that are particular to your needs, which you won’t find with other systems.
3. Look for software that uses street-level routing versus as-the-crow-flies mapping. You can’t always take a straight line to your destination. Your route optimization must consider things like bodies of water, parks, and schools.
4. Real-time automation is essential to remain agile for sudden changes. You will need to accommodate illness, jobs that run late, traffic, and bad weather.
5. Route optimization software should have integrations with your other business functions. These include sales/CRM, fleet management, and accounting.
6. If you’re not sure which route planning system is best for you, consider exploring those that offer a free or low-cost trial period. You can also ask to have a demo performed so you can see how a platform would work for your unique business.