How can Route Optimization Revolutionize Your E-commerce Business?

The process of making routes more efficient and economical is known as route optimization. Companies can maximize completed orders or deliveries by using efficient route optimization, which takes into account a variety of factors such as driver schedules, available hours, total stops, completion estimates, and legal requirements. 

Finding the most efficient route for a variety of factors is what delivery routing is all about, not just the shortest path from point A to point B.

Whether your business provides direct-to-consumer deliveries or your technicians visit clients’ homes or businesses as part of their service, route optimization is relevant.

With the correct tool, routing your drivers and technicians can be an automated process that saves money, increases customer satisfaction, and eliminates frustration. 

Key components of route optimization

1. Adding information about a task or delivery 

the best software for route optimization lets you upload a lot of data at once, like tasks, customers, appointments, or deliveries. Those things are:

• Scheduled or actual date of delivery
• What time the delivery or appointment is
• Date or time of service on site
• Name of the customer
• The business Address of the customer
• Business point of contact Phone number and email address

Most of the time, you can either import data from a static source, like an Excel spreadsheet (.csv file) or link it to an order management system using APIs. 

2. Making a plan for several stops along the way

Software that helps you find the best routes should let you list all of your appointments and deliveries for a certain date.The system should divide the tasks among the drivers based on how many you import and then find the best routes and schedules for them automatically.Some SaaS providers have limits on how many tasks you can add based on the package you choose.

3. Write down the start and end times at the destination

Service times on location need to be different for each industry. A driver who needs to get electronic proof of delivery doesn’t have the same service time as a field agent who needs to set up equipment in a customer’s home. That’s why software that helps you find the best routes should let you set different start and end times for each destination to take into account the different service times there. That helps drivers make sure they keep appointments and deliveries on time. but operation managers and route planners who can make plans for them based on how much your fleet can carry. This short guide will teach you how to improve last-mile delivery when you can’t meet all the orders.

4. Change delivery routes and times

 while you’re on the deliveries and field service appointments aren’t always the same. A customer might not be home or have to cancel an appointment. Or, a driver may run into slower service or more time on the road on the way from somewhere else. When that happens, dynamic routing software should let you change routes and delivery times while you’re on the go. You should also be able to add new drop-offs and deliveries to the schedule in case of cancellations or missed deliveries.

5. Quick and easy route planning

Software and apps that help you plan your routes should be quick. If the tool takes more than a few minutes to figure out the best route for the whole fleet, it doesn’t do its job. In the same way, the routes should be as quick and easy as possible. The software should not only include operational parameters, but it should also make routes with a high route density to keep costs low.

6. Compatible with various other software and apps

Are you planning routes by hand? It can be just as boring to use a bunch of disconnected apps and software programs to plan your routes as it is to do it by hand. So software that helps you find the best routes should be able to work with other systems and apps. Most of the time, this is done by the best routing software by integrating routing APIs. It can also connect to many other apps, such as your third-party provider’s fleet tracking software and systems for managing orders and stock. Learn everything you need to know about whether to use an internal or external delivery fleet.

7. Teams and drivers can share routes.

You should choose route optimization software that has a dashboard and a driver app as its two main parts. The dashboard is where you plan routes and make delivery times, but the driver app lets you share that information with teams that are out in the field.

Benefits for e-commerce businesses

1. Get more money from each driver and cut costs

What kind of business doesn’t want to lower its costs and make more money per driver? A company that does delivery routing or service on-site is always going up against low margins. Making sure that you are using your resources as efficiently as possible and not wasting time or money is an important part of managing a mobile workforce.

To be as efficient as possible with routing and scheduling, you need to answer some tough questions:

Which route will help drivers the most and cut down on costs?

Should you pay people extra hours or hire outside help

Route optimization can help you save money without lowering the quality of service or breaking the law by taking into account all costs, from hourly wages to mileage and everything else. It also helps you get the most out of your fleet, so each driver can finish more orders or service calls, which brings in more money and makes you more money.

2. Grow your delivery team without adding more resources for planning and dispatching

Every day, your team spends hours putting people, schedules, shifts, deliveries, and appointments in order and then rearranging them.

You can cut down the planning time from hours to minutes with tools that help you find the best routes. Nextbillion.ai lets you directly import order lists in CSV or Excel formats. Based on driver availability and needs, the lists are then automatically assigned to drivers.

Your company can make schedules up to five weeks ahead of time, which helps with long-term planning. You can make plans months ahead of time with advanced delivery route planning software.

That’s not all—it also takes into account employee availability (like holidays and paid time off), lunch breaks, driver breaks, customer availability (like only Tuesdays and Thursdays), dates, and more.

3. Boosts customer happiness 

Today, customer reviews are more important than ever for the success or failure of your business.

Reviews are important for more than just big online stores like Amazon. They affect all kinds of businesses that deal with customers. Users should be able to honestly and positively judge your online reputation if you want people to trust you with their money.

Get real-time arrival times, track your packages, and get SMS and email alerts before service calls or deliveries. This will help you avoid delays, failed deliveries, and rescheduled appointments.

And that makes customers happier and more loyal to the brand. 

4. Makes work more evenly distributed and keeps employees longer.

How do you currently divide up service calls and deliveries among your drivers? If your business is like most, you set it up by geography, giving each driver their own assigned delivery or service area.

This is a quick way to do it, and even someone who hasn’t done it before can do it by hand. You’re only assigning tasks based on lines on a map, after all.

It’s not a perfect answer, though…

Can you fairly divide up the work without spending a lot of extra money on hours and mileage?

What if not all parts of the city or state get the same number of deliveries or service calls?

What if the drivers who cover different areas have vehicles that can’t do the same things, like transporting food or storing things?

It’s simple to make sure that some drivers have to make a lot more deliveries than others and always have to work extra hours. Or where you pay your most expensive driver to just wait around in their truck.

All of these questions are answered by optimized routing, which takes them into account when planning the route in the first place. You can make sure that all of your drivers have a good work-life balance by giving them orders at the same time.

That can make a huge difference in keeping employees, which is hard to do in many relevant fields. 

Because there aren’t enough commercial drivers right now, you want to keep the good ones working for as long as possible.

5. It lets you change your plans quickly

Routes will always need to be changed at the last minute, and it’s a huge job to try to make changes to multiple drivers’ schedules by hand on the fly.

The need for dynamic planning, which means recalculating routes instantly and automatically to account for changes in the real world, is clear in 2021.

A well-thought-out schedule can be thrown off in an instant by things like late orders, cancellations, drivers calling in sick, or customers asking for different delivery addresses.

When you plan your routes ahead of time, you need to be able to change them at any time and manage your drivers from afar.

When a driver calls in sick or orders come in at the last minute, you need to  figure out who is available and give the new jobs to all of your drivers evenly, based on their current location, capacity, and route, so that no one driver is overworked.