Three Ways Route Optimisation Can Increase Your Profits

Time is money. It might be a cliché but the transport industry knows every minute matters in determining a profit or a loss. You don’t make money when standing still. 

An inefficient route, long driving hours and excessive fuel guzzling can all reduce the dollars made on a delivery run. Multiply this by hundreds of deliveries across several customers and suddenly poor route optimisation can have a massive impact on your business.

In contrast, using a transport management system that incorporates route optimisation and efficient route planning tools can make a positive difference to profits and the daily performance of logistics businesses. 

Building customer experience 

Planning the most optimal route is crucial to ensuring customers receive their packages at the expected time. Customer experience can be damaged if deliveries are delayed, if delivery time windows are vague or drivers don’t get through all of their deliveries. This can hurt the reputation of your business and harm your relationship with customers. The last thing you want is for a business to turn to a competitor instead, which will hurt your bottom line.

Route optimisation can look at all the different locations a driver needs to go to and then figure out the most efficient way to complete the deliveries. It allows you to improve customer service by allowing deliveries to be performed more quickly in a more specific time window. Enhancing customer experience can help to retain existing work and gives you a strong platform to grow your business and profits. 

Save on running costs 

The only winners from poor route planning are the big fuel companies. Fuel is a major running cost and inefficient use can cut into your bottom line - while filling the coffers of petrol companies. You also want your drivers spending more time on the road completing deliveries and less time at the bowser. 

Route optimisation can make sure you are getting the most out of every litre of fuel by calculating the best route between locations. This will save you time, fuel and ultimately money. Less time on the road means less maintenance costs for vehicle fleets as well. 

Get savvy to get more out of your drivers

Profits can be increased when the number of deliveries per day made by each driver increases. But you don’t want more deliveries to equal longer driving hours, which can lead to tired drivers and compliance headaches. Route optimisation is about making more deliveries more efficiently to boost your bottom line.

Increasing deliveries safely can be achieved by using route optimisation software to put drivers on the best routes in terms of both distances travelled and travel time.

Using CartonCloud's driver mobile app, drivers are empowered to optimise the route so they can put in where they want to begin, where they want to finish, and then they can go and optimise their route for the day. They can even specify which job they want to do first, second or even last, and then have it optimised within those constraints.

Benefits Using CartonCloud

When considering a transport management system keep in mind that it should give you the ability to optimise drivers' routes and be flexible enough to shift jobs around according to the delivery run. 

One of the features within CartonCloud is that you can set up the optimisation to end at a specific point that they've recorded, such as a driver’s home address. So if you're working with contract drivers, they can optimise the routes such that they'll start at your warehouse with the stock and then they'll finish at their house, saving time and fuel not coming back to the warehouse.

Having this type of flexibility in a transport management system means it's going to cost you less money as well because you're not paying them to do all this extra driving. You're just paying them for the time, which is as minimal as possible to get those jobs delivered.